Nature Communications Impact Factor: 18.1 (2025 JCR) — Fees, Speed and Every Figure Rule

Nature Communications metrics at a glance

Every figure below comes from the journal’s own Journal Metrics page, which carries the whole Clarivate set rather than the single number most sites quote. The Journal Impact Factor, 5-year JIF, Immediacy Index, Eigenfactor and Article Influence Score are computed by Clarivate and published in Journal Citation Reports; SNIP and SJR are computed from Scopus data by CWTS and Scimago respectively. The journal restates all of them.

The abbreviation row settles a question people search for more often than the metrics themselves. The journal gives it as Nat Commun, without a full stop, in the masthead at the foot of every one of its pages. Reference styles that punctuate abbreviated journal titles render it Nat. Commun.; both refer to the same ISO 4 abbreviation, and which one you use is your reference style’s decision, not the journal’s.

What is the impact factor of Nature Communications?

18.1, for the 2025 JCR year.

That is the two-year Journal Impact Factor: citations recorded during 2025 to items the journal published in 2023 and 2024, divided by the count of citable items published across those two years. The 5-year JIF widens the window to 2020–2024 and comes out slightly higher, at 18.9.

Those two numbers sitting within 0.8 of each other is the useful part. A journal whose two-year figure runs well below its five-year figure is being cited on a long tail, the way a methods journal is. A journal whose two-year figure runs well above is riding something recent. Nature Communications is doing neither, which is what you would expect from a title publishing several thousand papers a year across every discipline: the aggregate is stable because it is an average over a very large and very mixed body of work.

That mixture is also the reason the single number tells you less here than it would for a specialist journal. Nature Communications publishes in life, health, social, physical, chemical and Earth sciences. A condensed-matter paper and a cancer-genomics paper in the same volume sit in fields with citation rates that differ by a factor of several, and the JIF averages across both. SNIP, at 3.422, is the number to reach for when comparing across fields, because normalising for the citation behaviour of the citing field is exactly what it is built to do.

If you are searching for the 2024 or the 2026 figure: JCR publishes one release a year, and 18.1 is the current one. The 2024 release gave a different value for the same journal, and next year’s will give another. The metric year, not the calendar year you are reading in, is what a quoted impact factor is attached to.

Nature vs Nature Communications: what the difference actually is

The names differ by one word and the journals differ by almost everything else. Springer Nature states the editorial distinction itself, in the guide to authors:

Nature Communications publishes high-quality papers from all areas of science that represent important advances within specific scientific disciplines but that might not necessarily have the scientific reach of papers published in Nature and the Nature research journals.

Reach is the criterion, not quality. A paper can be technically flawless, important to its community, and still be a Nature Communications paper rather than a Nature paper because its audience is one discipline rather than all of them.

Two rows there change what you actually do.

Nature Communications does not consider pre-submission enquiries. Its Article page says so plainly and explains why: the editors prefer to decide with all relevant material at hand. If you are used to sending a Nature editor an abstract and a paragraph to test the water, that route does not exist here. You submit the full manuscript or you do not submit.

A transfer carries the referee reports with it. If a paper is declined by another Nature journal, the editor sends a link to an automated manuscript transfer service, and referees’ comments — including confidential comments to the editor — and identities travel to the receiving editor along with the manuscript. You can decline that and request a fresh review instead, but the choice has to be made at initial submission and cannot be changed later. A paper that collected one hostile report at Nature is better served by the fresh review; a paper that collected three broadly positive reports and one request for a control experiment is usually better served by the transfer, since papers felt to be of high quality can sometimes be accepted without further review.

The rest of the comparison is in our Nature impact factor and figure guide, which covers the parent journal’s own specifications, including the 5–7 pt type rule this journal declines to state.

The Communications journals are a separate family

Searches for "Nature Communications Biology" and "Nature Communications Medicine" are looking for journals whose actual names drop the word Nature. They are Communications Biology, Communications Medicine and six siblings. Each is a fully open access Nature Portfolio journal with its own editors, its own scope and its own metrics, and none of them is a section of Nature Communications.

The speed columns are where this table earns its keep. Communications Chemistry reaches acceptance in a median of 140 days against Communications Medicine’s 288, a difference of nearly five months between two journals with impact factors half a point apart. Communications Materials answers in a median of four days at the first decision, the fastest in the portfolio and less than half the wait at Nature Communications itself.

Whichever of them you submit to, the figure specifications below still apply in substance: they are the Nature Portfolio production rules, and the Communications journals inherit them from the same house style.

What does it cost to publish in Nature Communications?

The journal is fully open access, so there is no subscription route and no way to publish in it without an article processing charge. The current APC is £5,490.00 / $7,350.00 / €6,150.00, subject to VAT or local taxes where applicable.

Three details on that number are worth knowing before you submit rather than after.

The price is fixed by the acceptance date, not the submission date. With a median of 242 days from submission to acceptance, a paper submitted this year is very likely to be accepted under next year’s price list. Budget against the future number, not the one on the page today.

Waiver requests have a deadline, and it is the submission. Springer Nature offers automatic waivers and discounts for corresponding authors based in the world’s lowest income countries, and considers discretionary requests from other authors case by case in cases of financial need. All applications for discretionary waivers and discounts must be made at the point of manuscript submission; requests made during the review process or after acceptance cannot be considered. A year of review is not a window in which to sort out funding.

The licence is a choice with consequences. Articles are published under either CC BY-NC-ND or CC BY. CC BY-NC-ND permits sharing for non-commercial purposes with credit, and requires permission for commercial re-use or for sharing adapted versions. CC BY permits both, commercial use included. Several funders mandate CC BY, so check your grant conditions before selecting, because the choice governs whether anyone can legally redraw your figures.

Acceptance rate, decision times, and the number the journal does not publish

Nature Communications publishes no acceptance rate. Not on its Journal Metrics page, which carries citation, speed and usage sections and stops there; not in its guide to authors; not on its editorial process page. Nature, by contrast, states about 8% on its editorial criteria page. The sister journal’s willingness to publish that number makes this journal’s silence a deliberate omission rather than an oversight.

Percentages for Nature Communications circulate widely on aggregator sites. None of them come from the journal, none carry a metric year, and we are not going to repeat them. What the journal does publish is timing:

• 9 days to first editorial decision, median, 2025. Most of what that measures is desk decisions. The metric is defined as the time from receipt to the point where the submission is either sent out for review or rejected, so a fast answer here is more often a rejection than a triumph.
• 242 days to acceptance, median, 2025. Just under eight months, and 79 days faster than Nature.

Two process rules affect the second number more than anything about your science. Revisions carry a deadline specified in the decision letter, typically two months, and returning within it preserves your original submission date. And a maximum of two resubmissions will be considered for any manuscript, after which a final decision is made. A third round of "we would like one more control" does not exist here.

The transparency of the review is also fixed rather than optional. For submissions received on or after 1 November 2022, reviewer comments to the authors and author rebuttal letters are published alongside every accepted original research article, as a supplementary peer review file, with no opt-out. Write the rebuttal knowing it will be read by people who are not the referees.

Springer Nature signs the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment and says so at the top of the same page that publishes the 18.1. DORA’s first general recommendation is not to use journal-based metrics as a surrogate for the quality of individual research articles, or in hiring, promotion or funding decisions; its sixth asks journals to stop promoting the impact factor, or at least to present it among a range of metrics. The declaration also records the origin of the measure: the Journal Impact Factor was created to help librarians decide which journals to buy, and citation distributions within journals are highly skewed, which is why an average over a journal says so little about any paper in it.

Word limits, figure limits and what counts as a display item

Nature Communications publishes original research in exactly one format, Articles, which may run from short communications to more in-depth studies. There is no Letter, no Report, no Brief Communication. All of the limits below come from the Article content-type page.

The display-item budget is proportional rather than fixed, and the journal explains why: display items have to be typeset, so their number should be commensurate with the word length. Ten figures on a 2,500-word paper will be cut back regardless of how good each one is.

Two smaller rules trip people up more often than the limits. Schemes are not used. A sequence of chemical reactions or experimental procedures is submitted as a figure with a caption, not as a scheme. And a limited number of uncaptioned graphics of chemical structures may be included, each labelled by name, by a defined abbreviation or by a bold Arabic numeral, but the editorial team makes the final call on positioning and grouping.

How wide should a Nature Communications figure be?

88 mm for a single column, 180 mm for a double column. The journal states that one- or two-column format figures are required, so these are not guidelines to design near — they are the two widths that exist.

It also gives pixel floors for bitmapped images: no less than 1,040 pixels wide for single-column figures and no less than 2,080 pixels wide for double-column figures, excluding peripheral white space.

Run those against the 300 DPI minimum stated in the same section and one of them does not agree with itself. 88 mm is 3.46 inches, and 1,040 px across 3.46 inches is exactly 300 dpi — the single-column floor is the conversion, rounded up. 180 mm is 7.09 inches, and 2,080 px across 7.09 inches is about 294 dpi, which is under the journal’s own minimum. The double-column number looks like the single-column number doubled rather than converted.

The practical resolution: build double-column figures at 2,126 px or wider, which is 300 dpi at 180 mm, and both rules are satisfied at once. The extra 46 pixels cost nothing and remove the only place where the specification contradicts itself.

Depth is bounded by the page rather than specified directly. Figures should be prepared to fit the PDF page size, which the journal gives as 210 × 276 mm. That is 210 mm wide like A4 but 21 mm shorter, so a full-page figure built on an A4 artboard is too tall by about the height of a caption. Set the artboard to 210 × 276 mm and the question goes away.

One more sizing rule sits in the fine print of the submission page and again in the editorial process page, which is usually a sign the journal has had to enforce it: reasonable requests to enlarge figures will be considered, but the editors make the final decision about the size of figures. Design for 88 mm if the content will survive it, because that is where a marginal figure will end up.

Resolution, file formats and the one-point line rule

The file-format rule divides on what the figure is made of, not on what it depicts.

Line art, graphs, charts and schematics go as vector. EPS, AI or PDF, saved or exported directly from the application that made them. The journal is explicit that these must not be flattened, compressed, converted or saved as bitmaps, JPEGs or other non-vector types. It prefers Adobe Illustrator files but accepts Word and PowerPoint. Where a line-art figure genuinely cannot be supplied as vector, it must be supplied at 1,200 DPI and prepared to fit the page size — 8,504 pixels across a double column, which is the strongest argument in the guidelines for not rasterising in the first place.

Photographs and other bitmapped images go as TIFF at a minimum of 300 DPI, as close to the final page size as possible, in RGB for colour. If you submit a Word or PowerPoint file, any placed images must also be supplied as separate TIFFs prepared the same way. Scanning a laser printout is called out specifically: the dot pattern creates a moiré when scanned.

The typographic and drawing rules that follow are short enough to check against a finished figure in a couple of minutes:

• The thinnest lines in the final figure must be no smaller than one point wide. This is the journal’s only numeric typographic floor, and it applies to the figure as printed, so a hairline that survives at 180 mm may fail once the figure is set at 88 mm.
• Sans-serif lettering, Helvetica given as the example, with the same typeface at approximately the same size across every figure in the paper.
• Panel labels are lower-case bold a, b, c, set at the same type size as the other lettering in the figure.
• Lettering is lower case, with only the first letter of each label capitalised.
• A single space between a number and its unit, following SI nomenclature — ms, not msec. Numbers of five digits or more take comma separators.
• Scale bars, not magnification factors, with the length given in the legend rather than printed on the bar.
• White background. No excessive boxing, no unnecessary colour, no three-dimensional skyscraper histograms, no highly pixelated drawings.
• Histogram axes are not truncated to exaggerate small differences.
• Legends use visual cues rather than verbal ones. Describe the marker, not "open red triangles".

On colour, the journal asks specifically that green-and-red heatmaps, graphs and schematics with arbitrarily chosen colours be recoloured, and it names accessible pairs: green and magenta, turquoise and red, yellow and blue. Recolouring primary data such as fluorescence or rainbow pseudo-colour to colour-safe combinations is strongly encouraged rather than required, which means it is a reviewer comment waiting to happen rather than a rejection.

Chemistry figures have their own path: use the Nature Research Chemical Structures Guide and the ChemDraw template, and submit final files at 100% as .cdx. Stereo diagrams are presented for divergent wall-eyed viewing with the two panels about 5.5 cm apart.

What the journal does not specify, and what to use instead

Three things authors routinely search for are simply absent from the Nature Communications guidelines. Saying so is more useful than filling the gap with a number that would not bind anyone.

No minimum point size for figure lettering. The requirement is that labelling be of sufficient size and contrast to be readable after appropriate reduction. Nature’s formatting guide, a different journal in the same portfolio, gives a 5 pt minimum and 7 pt maximum with 8 pt bold panel labels. That is a reasonable fallback and it is what most Nature Portfolio production teams are used to seeing, but it is Nature’s rule, and nothing on the Nature Communications pages adopts it.

No acceptance rate, as above.

No JCR quartile or category rank. The Journal Metrics page publishes the JIF but not where that JIF places the journal within Multidisciplinary Sciences. Quartile and category rank live in Journal Citation Reports itself, which is a Clarivate subscription product; if you need the rank for a grant application, that is where it has to come from, and your library almost certainly has access.

No Microsoft Word manuscript template. The journal states outright that it does not use one. The formatting it does require is minimal: double-spaced, single-column, unjustified text, pages numbered with Arabic numerals in the footer, standard fonts, and the symbols font for Greek characters. For TeX/LaTeX, any standard class file works — article.cls, revtex.cls, amsart.cls — in default Computer Modern, with references pasted into the .tex file itself because BibTeX .bib files cannot be accepted.

The gel and blot files you have to hand over

This is where Nature Portfolio policy bites hardest, and it applies to Nature Communications in full.

Every life science paper published in a Nature Portfolio journal must submit unprocessed original images of gels and western blots with the final accepted version, and those unprocessed images are published in the Supplementary Information. Not held on file, not available on request — published.

The presentation rules that go with it:

• Processing such as brightness and contrast adjustment is acceptable only when applied equally across the entire image and equally to controls. Contrast may not be adjusted so that data disappear.
• Touch-up tools — cloning, healing, anything that deliberately obscures a manipulation — are unacceptable.
• Re-arranged lanes that are non-adjacent in the gel must be clearly indicated with a visible boundary between them, and the re-arrangement stated in the legend.
• Loading controls must be run on the same blot. Where sample processing controls come from a different gel, the legend has to say so.
• Cropped gels must retain all important bands, and high-contrast gels are discouraged because overexposure masks additional ones.
• Quantitative comparison between samples on different gels or blots is strongly discouraged; where unavoidable, the legend must state that the samples derive from the same or parallel experiments and were processed in parallel.

Nature Portfolio spot-checks images from randomly chosen papers and editors may use software to screen for manipulation. Separately, Nature Communications may request a source data file in Excel or a zipped folder containing, at minimum, the numerical data underlying every graph and chart and uncropped versions of any gels or blots in the figures, one sheet per figure, with blot images pasted in and labelled by panel and by the antibody used.

The practical consequence is a filing habit rather than a figure-design skill. The unprocessed scan you will be asked for at acceptance was made eight months earlier by whoever ran the blot. Keep it, named to match the panel it becomes.

A pre-submission checklist

• Title under 15 words, abstract under 200 with no references
• Main text near 5,000 words, Methods under 3,000
• Display items within budget: 10 maximum, 4 if the paper is under 2,000 words
• No schemes; reaction and procedure sequences submitted as captioned figures
• Every figure laid out at 88 mm or 180 mm, nothing in between
• Bitmaps at 300 DPI minimum, at least 1,040 px single column and 2,126 px double
• Line art as unflattened EPS, AI or PDF; 1,200 DPI only if vector is impossible
• Artboard set to 210 × 276 mm for anything full page
• Thinnest rule in the figure at least 1 pt at final printed size
• Sans-serif lettering, one typeface, one size across all figures
• Panel labels lower-case bold a, b, c at the body lettering size
• Scale bars present, lengths stated in the legends
• Green-and-red pairings recoloured
• Each legend under 350 words, all legends after the references
• Unprocessed gel and blot scans located and named before you need them
• Waiver or discount request submitted with the manuscript, not later
• Fresh review or transfer decided at initial submission, because it is final

Frequently asked questions

What is the impact factor of Nature Communications? 18.1 for the 2025 JCR year, with a 5-year JIF of 18.9, an Immediacy Index of 3.8, an Eigenfactor Score of 1.64865, an Article Influence Score of 5.590, a SNIP of 3.422 and an SJR of 4.904.

What is the acceptance rate of Nature Communications? The journal does not publish one, on any of its metrics, author or editorial pages. It publishes speed instead: a median of 9 days to first editorial decision and 242 days to acceptance, both 2025. Percentages quoted elsewhere are not the journal’s figures.

How much is the Nature Communications APC? £5,490.00 / $7,350.00 / €6,150.00, subject to VAT or local taxes, set by the acceptance date rather than the submission date.

Is Nature Communications the same as Nature? No. It is a separate, fully open access journal in the same portfolio, publishing advances important within a discipline rather than across all of science, with its own editors and no external editorial board.

What figure width does Nature Communications use? 88 mm single column and 180 mm double column. Figures are required to be in one of those two formats.

What resolution does Nature Communications require? 300 DPI minimum for TIFF bitmaps at final size, 1,200 DPI for line art that cannot be supplied as vector. Vector is preferred for all line art, graphs, charts and schematics.

How many figures can I include? Up to 10 display items, figures and tables combined, scaled to the word count — no more than 4 for a paper under 2,000 words.

Does Nature Communications accept graphical abstracts? The submission guidelines do not list one among the elements of an Article. What they do offer is a featured image: authors of accepted papers are encouraged to submit an illustration for consideration as an image of the week, selected for scientific interest and aesthetic appeal, supplied at acceptance with a short legend.

Can I send a pre-submission enquiry? No. The journal states that it does not consider them and prefers to decide with the full manuscript in hand.

Where to go next

The metric on this page takes ten seconds to read and settles a decision you had probably already made. The specifications take an afternoon and decide whether that decision costs you a production round eight months from now.

The pattern behind almost every figure rule above is one requirement in different clothes: the artwork has to still be editable, and still legible, when it is set at 88 mm by someone who has never seen your data. Live vector paths, one typeface at one size, rules at real weights, scale bars instead of magnifications. Everything else follows from that.

If you are preparing a submission to another Nature Portfolio title, our Scientific Reports figure requirements guide covers a journal at the other end of the same portfolio, one that publishes almost none of its own specifications and inherits them all.

For the featured image and the summary graphics that sit outside the figure budget, our graphical abstract requirements guide covers what different publishers actually ask for and what they do with it.

And if the tooling is the bottleneck rather than the rules, our comparison of figure tools is honest about which ones export the unflattened vector output that every rule on this page depends on.