Nature Communications Impact Factor

The practical read is simple: Nature Communications is still a top-tier multidisciplinary journal, but the post-2021 citation inflation has washed out. The 2024 number is slightly lower year over year, not a collapse.

It tells you that Nature Communications still sits well above broad-volume alternatives and still belongs in the same decision set as Science Advances and PNAS.

The higher five-year JIF (17.2) matters because it shows the journal's citation base remains strong over a longer window, even though the annual JIF has normalized after the COVID-era peak.

The five-year JIF (17.2) sitting above the two-year JIF (15.7) is the most useful data point here. It shows that the post-2021 normalization is a citation window effect, not a change in the journal's underlying authority. Papers published in 2019-2022 are still accumulating citations at a rate that keeps the longer average elevated. A journal whose five-year JIF is below its two-year JIF has a different problem: early-cited papers that didn't hold up.

The SJR of 4.521 confirms that the journals citing Nature Communications papers are themselves high-prestige. This matters if you are in a field where citation counts are inflated by large-volume journals citing each other.

Nature Communications is fully open access with a per-article APC of $7,350 USD (updated 2025). Every paper is published under CC BY 4.0 and freely available on publication.

The APC is the most common reason authors choose Science Advances ($5,450) or PNAS ($1,950 immediate OA) instead. If your institution has a Springer Nature transformative agreement, the APC may be covered or heavily discounted. Check with your library before assuming you're paying out of pocket.

For authors at institutions without agreements, the cost difference is real enough to influence the decision. A Nature Communications paper and a Science Advances paper carry similar weight in most multidisciplinary fields. A 35% APC premium for Nature Communications is justified if the journal is genuinely stronger for your subfield's norms; it is harder to justify on IF alone.

The 15.7 IF tells you where the journal sits. It doesn't tell you how the editorial machine actually works, and that's what determines whether your paper survives.

Nature Communications editors are full-time professional PhDs, not working academics. Led by Chief Editor Manuel Breuer, the team handles 60,000+ submissions per year. They're generalists who rely on pattern recognition, not deep field expertise, to triage. That has a practical consequence: your cover letter matters more here than at a society journal, because these editors won't already know your subfield's context.

The desk rejection rate is brutal. Research on 128,000+ Nature portfolio submissions shows that 75-92% of papers are rejected without peer review, most within the first 8 days. If your paper is still listed as "Under Consideration" after 14 days, that's actually good news, you likely cleared the desk.

What gets desk-rejected fast: papers where the significance claim doesn't travel beyond one specialist audience, papers that are technically sound but incremental, and papers where the abstract can't excite a reader outside the immediate subfield. The editors themselves have said the bar is a "striking advance", meaning it needs to change how people in your field think, not just add another data point.

Nature Communications uses single-blind peer review: reviewers see your identity, you don't see theirs. Typical progression:

The 8-day desk decision is one of the fastest at this tier. If you clear the desk, expect a minimum of 3-4 months to first decision including revision. Papers requiring major revision can take 9-12 months from submission to acceptance.

Nature Communications does not use a tiered transfer system where rejected papers automatically move to lower-tier journals in the portfolio. Each submission stands independently.

In our pre-submission review work with manuscripts targeting Nature Communications, three patterns generate the most consistent desk-rejection outcomes. The desk rejection rate runs 75-92%, handled by full-time professional editors who process 60,000+ submissions per year and decide within 8 days. SciRev community data from author-reported timelines confirms the median first decision at 8 days, with handling quality rated 3.6/5.0 across reported submissions. We see this 8-day speed used against authors who haven't prepared their significance argument: a desk rejection at 8 days usually means the editor identified the problem in the abstract, not from reading the full paper.

Framing for a specialist audience when the editor is a generalist. Nature Communications editors have stated the bar explicitly in rejection letters: the findings must represent "a sufficiently striking advance to justify publication." The problem is that most authors frame significance for a specialist reader who already understands why the question matters. These editors are PhDs but not experts in your subfield. The abstract and first paragraph need to sell the result to a reader who has no prior context. Papers that lead with technical background before establishing broad significance fail this filter. The significance case must be made before the technical content, not embedded within it.

Incremental progress submitted as a striking advance. The journal's stated threshold requires that papers represent a "significant advance" for their field, specifically work that meaningfully changes how researchers in a discipline think or work. Editors distinguish this from work that is technically sound and adds to a body of literature, which belongs in a field journal. The most common desk rejection is a paper that is the best work in its subfield this year but is incremental relative to the overall discipline. Technical quality and a well-defined scope fit are necessary conditions but do not substitute for field-level advance.

Cover letter that describes rather than argues significance. At Nature Communications, the cover letter functions as a pitch document. Society journals often have editorial board members with domain expertise who can evaluate manuscripts independently. NComms editors process too many submissions to develop deep field knowledge, so they rely on the cover letter to understand why this result, in this field, at this moment, merits a multidisciplinary journal over a top field journal. Letters that open with "We would like to submit our manuscript" or that describe the methods rather than argue the significance are structurally disadvantaged. The letter should make the specific case for why this finding belongs here rather than in a top specialty journal.

If any of these three patterns match your manuscript, a desk-rejection risk check takes 60 seconds and tells you whether your significance framing, cover letter argument, and abstract structure clear the desk at Nature Communications before you find out in 8 days.

• whether your paper fits the journal's scope
• how likely the editor is to desk reject (answer: very likely, 75-92%)
• how long peer review will take (answer: 5-20 weeks if you clear the desk)
• whether your specific article will be highly cited

Those are separate questions, and they matter more than the IF number itself. For fit guidance, see our Nature Communications submission guide. For a comparison with the closest alternatives, see Nature Communications vs Science Advances.