Bone Marrow Transplantation

About Bone Marrow Transplantation

DEPTH-142-OCT2026

Overview

Bone Marrow Transplantation (Bone Marrow Transplant., CODEN BMTRE9) is a peer-reviewed medical journal published by Springer Nature through its Nature Research portfolio (nature.com/bmt). Founded in 1986, it is one of the oldest and most established specialist journals devoted to hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Its own journal page describes its mission succinctly: it publishes "high quality, peer reviewed original research and reviews addressing all aspects of basic biology and clinical use of haemopoietic cell transplantation." The journal is the official journal of the EBMT (European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation), the largest international society for professionals working in blood and marrow transplantation and cellular therapy — a relationship that shapes much of its content, including the annual publication of abstracts from the EBMT Annual Meeting.

The journal's official metrics page (nature.com/bmt/about, labeled "2025") reports a two-year Journal Impact Factor of 5.1, a five-year impact factor of 4.7, a Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) of 1.496 and a SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) of 1.704. In 2025 the journal recorded 2,395,337 full-text downloads and 1,921 Altmetric mentions. It publishes monthly — 12 issues per year — under a hybrid (subscription plus open-access option) publishing model.

OpenAlex indexes 11,929 works for the journal, which have collectively attracted over 346,000 citations, and computes an h-index of 171 for the title — figures that place it among the most-cited specialist journals in hematology and transplantation. Third-party ranking tables based on Scopus data place the journal in the first quartile (Q1) of its subject categories.

The journal's content mix reflects its dual identity as a research journal and a society journal. Alongside standard original articles and reviews, it publishes EBMT working-party guidelines and consensus statements, the annual EBMT meeting abstract supplement, and curated themed collections — including the "Emerging Leaders in BMT" series highlighting early-career investigators, and focused collections such as the pre-transplant measurable residual disease (Pre-MEASURE) series on AML prognosis. Open-access articles are prominently featured on its current-issue pages, reflecting the hybrid model's growing OA share. For a specialist transplant audience — physicians, laboratory scientists, specialist nurses, pharmacists, and data managers in transplant programs — it functions as both a research venue and a practice reference: its guideline and consensus papers are routinely cited in ward protocols and clinical-trial designs.

History

Bone Marrow Transplantation began publication in 1986, a founding date confirmed by multiple independent records: the journal's first volume appeared in 1986, the NLM Catalog records "Publication Start Year: 1986" with MEDLINE indexing from volume 1, issue 1, and OpenAlex's coverage record begins the same year. It was established at a pivotal moment in the field's history — hematopoietic stem cell transplantation was moving from an experimental procedure to a standard therapy for hematologic malignancies and marrow failure syndromes, and the young European transplant community needed a dedicated specialist journal.

The journal was first published by Stockton Press (Macmillan Press's Scientific & Medical Division in Basingstoke, England), as recorded in the NLM Catalog. In 1999–2000 Stockton Press became the Specialist Journals division of the newly formed Nature Publishing Group — a transition announced in the journal itself in a January 2000 "Publisher's Announcement" (DOI 10.1038/sj.bmt.1702177). Publishing moved from Basingstoke to London under the Nature Publishing Group imprint, and the group is today part of Springer Nature.

From its earliest volumes the journal was intertwined with the European transplant community. The NLM Catalog notes that one supplement each year consisted of the proceedings of the annual meeting of the European Cooperative Group for Bone Marrow Transplantation — the predecessor of today's EBMT — and the journal eventually became the EBMT's official journal. Its current editorials continue to reflect that bond: the journal publishes abstracts from the EBMT Annual Meeting (including the 52nd Annual Meeting's abstracts in 2026) and themed collections on EBMT-priority topics such as pre-transplant measurable residual disease (MRD) in acute myeloid leukemia.

The journal's founding editor was John M. Goldman, who signed the journal's year-2000 "Editor's Note" as "Editor, Bone Marrow Transplantation" (DOI 10.1038/sj.bmt.1702176). Goldman, a pioneering figure in chronic myeloid leukemia and transplantation, shaped the journal through its formative decades.

The journal's digital footprint tells the story of its publisher transitions in its own DOI prefixes: articles from the Stockton Press era carry the 10.1038/sj.bmt prefix (as seen on the journal's 1997–2007 highly cited papers, e.g., 10.1038/sj.bmt.1705727), the Nature Publishing Group era introduced 10.1038/bmt (e.g., 10.1038/bmt.2012.244), and current articles use the Springer Nature portfolio prefix 10.1038/s41409 (e.g., 10.1038/s41409-020-0970-x) — all three prefixes verified resolving via Crossref during this research. Crossref's journal metadata shows continuous DOI registration from 1999 through 2026, and the journal's archive on nature.com and SpringerLink provides the full backfile to subscribing institutions.

The NLM Catalog records the journal's frequency as semimonthly from 1997 onward; the journal's current official page lists 12 issues per year (monthly). Both records are presented here for completeness.

Aims & Scope

The journal's own statement of purpose is to publish "high quality, peer reviewed original research and reviews addressing all aspects of basic biology and clinical use of haemopoietic cell transplantation." Its remit covers the full span of the field: stem cell biology, transplantation immunology, translational research, and clinical results of specific transplant protocols, including conditioning regimens, graft-versus-host disease, infections, supportive care, late effects, and cellular therapies that have grown out of transplantation practice.

In practice, the journal publishes original research articles, reviews, guidelines and consensus statements, correspondence, and special collections. It has a particular strength in publishing practice-changing guidance developed with professional societies — most notably joint EBMT position statements (for example, the revised diagnostic and severity criteria for sinusoidal obstruction syndrome/veno-occlusive disease, and the EBMT–NIH–CIBMTR task force statement on chronic graft-versus-host disease terminology) and evidence-based guidelines (such as the European Conference on Infections in Leukemia guidelines for antifungal management). The journal also runs an "Emerging Leaders in BMT" collection showcasing early-career researchers, and themed collections on topics such as pre-transplant MRD in AML.

The journal's scope sits at the intersection of hematology, oncology, immunology and transplantation medicine. Its core readership comprises transplant physicians, hematologists, immunologists, stem-cell biologists, specialist nurses, pharmacists, and clinical researchers in academic medical centers and transplant programs worldwide.

Editorial Leadership

The journal's editorial board page lists the journal as co-edited by Hillard M. Lazarus and Mohamad Mohty (as recorded in the journal's Wikipedia infobox and corroborated by secondary editorial listings; Reviewer Credits likewise lists Mohamad Mohty of Saint-Antoine Hospital, Paris, France, in an editorial role). Mohamad Mohty is a professor of hematology at Saint-Antoine Hospital and Sorbonne University in Paris and a past president of the EBMT; Hillard M. Lazarus is a longstanding figure in American transplant medicine at Case Western Reserve University. The founding editor was John M. Goldman, who led the journal from its 1986 launch through its first decade and a half.

The editorial board is international, with members from major transplant centers in Europe, North America, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America — including Mahmoud Aljurf (King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, Riyadh), Andrea Bacigalupo (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan), Mehdi Hamadani (Medical College of Wisconsin), Xiaojun Huang (Peking University), Tania Jain (Johns Hopkins University), and Carrie Lynn Kitko (Vanderbilt University Medical Center), among many others. On the publishing side, the journal's contact page names Lucinda Haines as Publishing Manager at Springer Nature, with the editorial office reachable at bmt@nature.com (tel. +44 20 3192 2216).

Indexing & Metrics

The journal's official journal-information page lists indexing in: BIOSIS; EBSCO Discovery Service; Google Scholar; Medline; OCLC; Science Citation Index; Science Citation Index Expanded (SciSearch); Current Contents/Clinical Medicine; Current Contents/Life Sciences; Summon by ProQuest; SCOPUS; EBSCO Academic Search; EBSCO Advanced Placement Source; EBSCO Biomedical Reference Collection; EBSCO STM Source; and EBSCO TOC Premier. The NLM Catalog confirms full MEDLINE indexing from volume 1, issue 1 (1986), with the journal included in Index Medicus. Its identifiers are: ISSN 0268-3369 (print), eISSN 1476-5365 (electronic), ISSN-L 0268-3369, CODEN BMTRE9, LCCN sn 86043211, OCLC 14220154, ISO 4 abbreviation Bone Marrow Transplant.

Officially displayed metrics (journal page, labeled 2025): Journal Impact Factor 5.1; 5-year Journal Impact Factor 4.7; SNIP 1.496; SJR 1.704. Usage: 2,395,337 downloads in 2025; 1,921 Altmetric mentions. Speed: median 3 days from submission to first editorial decision, median 115 days from submission to acceptance. OpenAlex (2026 data): 11,929 works indexed, 346,254 citations received, h-index 171, two-year mean citedness 3.23. Third-party tables based on Scopus data report a best quartile of Q1 (2024) and an impact score of approximately 5.1 in the 2024 cycle.

The journal is not open access by default and is not listed in DOAJ; it operates a hybrid model in which authors may choose open-access publication for individual articles.

APC & Publication Model

Bone Marrow Transplantation is a hybrid journal: articles are published behind a subscription paywall by default, and authors can opt for immediate open access through Springer Nature's open-access options. A per-article article processing charge (APC) figure is not officially published on the journal's information pages; authors seeking current open-access fees should consult Springer Nature's open-access funding pages or the editorial office at bmt@nature.com.

The journal publishes monthly (12 issues per year). Accepted articles appear online ahead of issue assignment, and the journal publishes an annual supplement carrying the abstracts of the EBMT Annual Meeting, alongside periodic themed collections.

Field Impact

Few specialist journals have standardized a medical field's daily practice as thoroughly as Bone Marrow Transplantation has. Its most consequential contribution may be as the venue where the transplant community agrees on what things mean. The 2016 EBMT revised diagnostic and severity criteria for sinusoidal obstruction syndrome/veno-occlusive disease gave clinicians and trialists a shared, validated language for a complication that had previously been defined inconsistently across centers; the 2018 EBMT–NIH–CIBMTR position statement on chronic graft-versus-host disease did the same for GVHD assessment, harmonizing terminology across three continents' registries and trials. These are not ordinary review articles — they are the field's operating manuals, and their citation trajectories (hundreds of citations each) reflect routine use in protocols, case-report forms, and regulatory submissions.

The journal's methods papers have had an even broader reach. The 2012 EZR paper — a description of a free, menu-driven front end for R aimed at clinicians without programming experience — became the single most-cited paper in the journal's history (over 18,900 citations), used across all of clinical medicine. Similarly, the 2007 "competing risk analysis using R" guide became a standard reference for transplant outcome studies, where analyses must handle relapse and non-relapse mortality as competing events. And in infection management, the ECIL antifungal guidelines (2011) set the European standard of care for prophylaxis and therapy in leukemia and transplant recipients.

The journal's COVID-19 guidance for acute leukemia management (2020), produced with the EBMT Acute Leukaemia Working Party, demonstrated the value of a society journal in a crisis: evidence-informed, practical recommendations delivered while the pandemic was still unfolding, cited over 660 times within a few years. Together with its annual EBMT meeting abstracts — which make the year's most important transplant science visible to the whole community — the journal functions as the field's institutional memory and its current-awareness service in one.

Landmark Papers

The following highly cited papers, all published in Bone Marrow Transplantation, have shaped research and clinical practice in the field. Citation counts are from OpenAlex (2026); each DOI was individually verified as resolving via Crossref at the time of research.

• Kanda Y (2013). "Investigation of the freely available easy-to-use software 'EZR' for medical statistics." Bone Marrow Transplant. DOI: 10.1038/bmt.2012.244 — With over 18,900 citations, this is by far the most-cited paper ever published in the journal. It introduced EZR, a free graphical user interface for the R statistical environment, which has since become one of the most widely used biostatistics tools in clinical medicine worldwide.
• Scrucca L, Santucci A, Aversa F (2007). "Competing risk analysis using R: an easy guide for clinicians." Bone Marrow Transplant. DOI: 10.1038/sj.bmt.1705727 — A practical guide to competing-risks survival analysis (over 700 citations) that became a standard methodological reference for transplant outcome studies, where relapse and non-relapse mortality compete as endpoints.
• Maertens J et al. (2011). "European guidelines for antifungal management in leukemia and hematopoietic stem cell transplant recipients: summary of the ECIL 3 — 2009 update." Bone Marrow Transplant. DOI: 10.1038/bmt.2010.175 — The European Conference on Infections in Leukemia (ECIL) guidelines on antifungal prophylaxis, empiric and pre-emptive therapy, which standardized infection management in transplant and leukemia units across Europe.
• Mohty M et al. (2016). "Revised diagnosis and severity criteria for sinusoidal obstruction syndrome/veno-occlusive disease in adult patients: a new classification from the European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation." Bone Marrow Transplant. DOI: 10.1038/bmt.2016.130 — The EBMT's revised diagnostic criteria for SOS/VOD, one of the most feared early complications of transplantation, widely adopted in clinical practice and clinical trials.
• Schoemans HM et al. (2018). "EBMT–NIH–CIBMTR Task Force position statement on standardized terminology & guidance for graft-versus-host disease assessment." Bone Marrow Transplant. DOI: 10.1038/s41409-018-0204-7 — A tri-society consensus harmonizing how chronic graft-versus-host disease is diagnosed and graded in research and practice.
• Brissot E et al. (2020). "Management of patients with acute leukemia during the COVID-19 outbreak: practical guidelines from the acute leukaemia working party of the European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation." Bone Marrow Transplant. DOI: 10.1038/s41409-020-0970-x — Rapid-response EBMT guidance on delivering intensive leukemia and transplant care during the pandemic, cited over 660 times.
• Koç ON et al. (2002). "Allogeneic mesenchymal stem cell infusion for treatment of metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD) and Hurler syndrome (MPS-IH)." Bone Marrow Transplant. DOI: 10.1038/sj.bmt.1703650 — An early clinical report on mesenchymal stromal cell infusion in inherited metabolic disorders, frequently cited in the history of cell-therapy development.
• McQuellon RP et al. (1997). "Quality of life measurement in bone marrow transplantation: development of the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Bone Marrow Transplant (FACT-BMT) scale." Bone Marrow Transplant. DOI: 10.1038/sj.bmt.1700672 — Introduced the FACT-BMT instrument, still one of the standard patient-reported outcome measures in transplant research.

How to Publish

Manuscripts are submitted through the journal's online submission system, linked from its Nature portfolio page (nature.com/bmt); queries about submitted manuscripts go to the editorial office at bmt@nature.com, and queries about accepted manuscripts in production to Springer Nature's production team. Authors should consult the journal's current Guide to Authors for article types, formatting, and ethics requirements before submitting.

Expectations on timing are unusually transparent: the journal's official page reports a median of 3 days from submission to first editorial decision and a median of 115 days from submission to acceptance. The journal welcomes original research, reviews, consensus and guideline statements (particularly those developed with EBMT or other societies), correspondence, and themed-collection contributions. Because it is the EBMT's official journal, work aligned with EBMT working-party priorities — conditioning, GVHD, infections, cellular therapy, and outcomes research — tends to fit well. With over 2.3 million downloads in 2025 and a broad international readership across transplant centers, the journal offers strong visibility for clinical and translational transplantation research.

Practical notes for prospective authors: choose the hybrid open-access option if funder or institutional mandates require it, and check current APC terms with the editorial office (bmt@nature.com) since fees are not published on the journal page. Guideline and consensus manuscripts typically involve society working parties and benefit from early engagement with the relevant EBMT working party; correspondence responding to published articles is welcomed and often published rapidly. Authors presenting at the EBMT Annual Meeting should note that meeting abstracts are published in the journal's annual supplement, providing a citable record of conference science alongside full peer-reviewed articles.