PNAS Nexus Impact Factor: 4.8 (2025) — and Everything It Does Differently From PNAS

PNAS Nexus at a glance

What is the impact factor of PNAS Nexus?

4.8, for 2025, published on the journal’s own About page and attributed there to Clarivate.

The category positions matter more than the number for a journal this young. PNAS Nexus ranks 9 of 275 in Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary and 23 of 140 in Multidisciplinary Sciences. The first of those is a strong placement; the second puts it in the same category as PNAS itself, nine places behind.

One number needs reading carefully. The cited half-life of 2.1 years looks dramatic next to the 11.5 years PNAS reports, but it is mostly an artefact of age. PNAS Nexus launched in 2022, so it has almost no old papers available to be cited, and a half-life cannot exceed the journal’s own lifespan by much. Read it as "too early to tell", not as "citations die fast here".

What is PNAS Nexus?

A gold open access, multidisciplinary journal published by the National Academy of Sciences in partnership with Oxford University Press, covering the biological, medical, physical, social and political sciences plus engineering and mathematics.

Its stated editorial interest is articles with broad interdisciplinary appeal at the intersection of one or more disciplines, including transdisciplinary work in emerging domains that combine two or more fields. That is not boilerplate — it is the selection criterion, and a single-discipline paper with no cross-field reach is being submitted to the wrong journal.

Practical facts about how it runs:

• Peer review is single anonymous, with typically two independent reviews secured by a handling editor. A single negative review the editor agrees with may be enough to recommend rejection.
• No presubmission enquiries. PNAS Nexus states it cannot consider them.
• A version of the peer-reviewed manuscript posts within one week of acceptance, replaced by the copyedited, typeset article in an open issue within four to six weeks.

PNAS Nexus vs PNAS: what actually differs

This is the comparison most people arrive needing, usually because a transfer has just been offered. Research Reports declined by PNAS for reasons other than soundness or technical merit may be recommended for transfer to PNAS Nexus, with the option to revise first.

The two journals share an editorial and image-integrity policy that is in places word for word identical. Everything about production differs.

The row that costs the most time is the format row. A figure set prepared to the PNAS Information for Authors, where PPT appears on the accepted list, is partly unusable at PNAS Nexus, where .ppt and .pptx are rejected outright along with .jpeg and .jpg. A transfer is not a re-upload.

Is PNAS Nexus a good journal?

The honest answer needs one piece of context that the impact factor alone hides: PNAS Nexus is indexed in ESCI, the Emerging Sources Citation Index, not in the Science Citation Index Expanded.

Clarivate extended the Journal Impact Factor to ESCI and AHCI journals in 2023, so a journal in ESCI now receives a JIF where previously it would have had none. That change brought more than 9,000 journals from over 3,000 publishers into JIF coverage. PNAS Nexus having an impact factor is therefore not by itself the signal it would have been three years ago, and its category rank carries more information than the 4.8 does.

What the rest of the record says: it is indexed in Scopus, DOAJ and PubMed Central, it is published by the National Academy of Sciences, it ranks 9 of 275 in its social sciences category, and it applies the same integrity screening and data-availability policies PNAS does. Those are the marks of a real journal, deliberately positioned as a companion title rather than a competitor to PNAS.

What is the PNAS Nexus acceptance rate?

Not published, and neither are median decision times.

That is worth stating plainly, because pages claiming a specific PNAS Nexus acceptance rate are inventing it or inferring it from samples they do not describe. PNAS publishes 13% for Direct Submissions along with 10-day and 45-day decision medians; PNAS Nexus publishes neither.

The only timing commitments the journal makes are after acceptance: the peer-reviewed manuscript posts within a week, and the typeset version within four to six weeks.

What does it cost to publish in PNAS Nexus?

Gold open access with mandatory charges, taken from Oxford University Press’s own charge calculator for this journal.

Those are list prices before reductions. Three things move them: a society membership discount, a Read and Publish agreement if your institution participates, and country-based waivers — OUP’s calculator only offers waiver-eligible countries in its country field, which is a reasonable proxy for who qualifies.

Licensing is CC BY 4.0 or CC BY-NC 4.0, chosen by the author. Check your funder’s requirement before selecting, since many mandate CC BY specifically.

What resolution does PNAS Nexus require?

The 350 dpi floor for photographs is unusual — most journals set 300 — and it is the kind of near-miss that passes a self-check based on habit. If your export preset says 300, it fails here.

The guidelines steer charts, graphs, maps and diagrams to vector, where the question disappears. Raster belongs to photographs and paintings.

Note what is not here: no column widths, no page depth, no minimum font size. PNAS publishes all three; PNAS Nexus publishes none of them. In the absence of a stated width, design so the figure survives reduction to a single column of a two-column journal page and check legibility there, and treat the PNAS geometry as the closest available reference rather than as a rule that binds this journal.

Which file formats does PNAS Nexus accept?

The rejection list is the important half, and JPEG being on it is the trap. JPEG is the default export from most plotting environments and the format people reach for when a TIFF looks large. It will not be accepted here.

Two assembly rules that differ from what many authors habitually do:

• One file per figure, with all panels of a multi-panel figure on a single page. A three-panel figure is one file, not three.
• Panels labelled with a letter in the upper-left corner, given as A, B, C, D — upper case, unlike the lower-case a, b, c that Nature and its portfolio use.

Figure titles and legends go in the manuscript file, not in the image file.

How many figures can a PNAS Nexus paper have?

The page budget is the same as PNAS’s, and figures spend from it alongside text.

The counting rule is stricter than it first appears: the abstract, significance statement, full text, figure captions and table legends all count toward the page limit. A generous set of legends is spending the same budget as the figures they describe.

The alt text you have to write yourself

PNAS Nexus requires alt text descriptions for every image, figure, illustration and photograph in the main article, supplied by the author. This is a genuine authoring task, not a checkbox, and it is easy to discover late.

The mechanics:

• Put each description in the main manuscript file, directly under the relevant figure legend, prefixed with Alt text:.
• Alt text is delivered through e-readers and does not appear in the typeset article.
• Do not refer to colours in captions for figures, whether black and white or colour — a caption that says "the red line" fails for the readers alt text exists to serve.
• The journal asks that the information in an image also be described by the caption or surrounding text.

This is the sharpest single divergence from PNAS, which generates alt text itself using AI reviewed by a scientific editor. Same organisation, opposite placement of the same work.

The image-integrity rules, inherited from PNAS

These are reproduced from the PNAS policy in near-identical wording, which means the standard does not relax when a paper transfers.

• No specific feature within an image may be enhanced, obscured, moved, removed, or introduced.
• Grouping or consolidating images from multiple sources must be made explicit by the arrangement of the figure and in the figure legend.
• Brightness, contrast and colour balance adjustments are acceptable only when applied to the whole image and only when they do not obscure, eliminate or misrepresent anything in the original, backgrounds included.
• PNAS Nexus screens manuscripts with software and may request original data for comparison. If the originals cannot be produced, the manuscript may be rejected.
• All raw visual data — blots, gels, micrographs — and all direct outputs from imaging systems must be retained unprocessed. Failure or refusal to provide data on request may be grounds for rejection or for retraction after publication.
• Consent is required for figures showing recognizable human faces.
• Error bars and statistics belong to independent experiments, not replicates within a single experiment.
• Suspected improper figure assembly, such as unauthorized duplication, may be reported to the author’s institution or funder, following COPE.

Generative AI use during the research process must be noted in Materials and Methods and may not be credited as an author.

A pre-submission checklist

• Photographs at 350 dpi or better, not 300
• Line art at 600 dpi, or 1,200 dpi if fine or complex — or vector, which settles it
• No .jpg, .jpeg, .ppt, .pptx, .doc or .docx anywhere in the figure files
• One file per figure, every panel of a multi-panel figure on one page
• Panels labelled A, B, C in the upper-left corner
• Figure titles and legends in the manuscript file, not burned into the image
• An Alt text: line under every figure legend
• No colour words in captions
• Supplementary files each under 5 MB
• Page budget counted with abstract, significance statement, captions and legends included
• Raw blots, gels and micrographs retained and ready to produce on request
• Licence chosen against your funder’s requirement, CC BY or CC BY-NC
• ORCID recorded for the corresponding author

Frequently asked questions

What is the impact factor of PNAS Nexus? 4.8 for 2025, with ranks of 9/275 in Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary and 23/140 in Multidisciplinary Sciences, and a Scopus CiteScore of 6.7.

Is PNAS Nexus the same as PNAS? No. It is a separate gold open access journal from the National Academy of Sciences, published with Oxford University Press and launched in 2022. Papers declined by PNAS for reasons other than soundness or technical merit may be recommended for transfer to it.

What is the PNAS Nexus acceptance rate? The journal does not publish one, and does not publish decision-time medians either. Any specific figure you find elsewhere is not coming from the journal.

What does PNAS Nexus charge? 3,599 USD for a Research Report, Perspective, Registered Report or Review; 2,101 USD for a Brief Report. Discounts, Read and Publish agreements and country waivers apply on top.

What resolution does PNAS Nexus need? 350 dpi for photographs, 600 dpi for line art, 1,200 dpi for complex line art. Vector for anything that is a chart or diagram.

Does PNAS Nexus accept JPEG figures? No. .jpeg and .jpg are rejected, along with Word and PowerPoint files.

Does PNAS Nexus publish figure column widths? No. It publishes neither column widths nor a minimum font size, which is a real gap against PNAS, where both are specified.

Where to go next

PNAS Nexus is the clearest case in this set for reading the production rules rather than the metrics. The impact factor tells you it is a young ESCI-indexed journal from a serious publisher. The file-format list tells you whether the afternoon you set aside for the submission will be enough.

If a transfer from PNAS is what brought you here, the two pages to read together are this one and our PNAS impact factor and figure guide, because the differences between them are exactly the work a transfer creates. For a contrasting citation profile at the other end of the scale, our Nature impact factor and figure guide covers a journal whose two-year and five-year figures sit almost on top of each other. And our Scientific Reports figure requirements guide covers the other large multidisciplinary open access option authors weigh against this one.