Bone Research

About Bone Research

Bone Research: Journal Profile

Bone Research is a fully open access, peer-reviewed journal devoted to all aspects of bone science, published on the Nature Portfolio platform in partnership with Springer Nature and the West China School of Stomatology at Sichuan University. Founded in 2013, it has grown from a new English-language periodical rooted in a Chinese research institution into one of the most highly cited titles in skeletal biology, with a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 20.1 as reported on its official journal-information page. This profile explains what the journal publishes, who leads it, how its review and open access model work, what its metrics do and do not mean, and how an author can judge whether a manuscript genuinely fits before submitting.

Identity at a Glance

The identifiers above are anchored to the journal's own records: the ISSN pair 2095-4700 and 2095-6231 appears consistently on the publisher platform, in the DOAJ record retrieved for this profile, and in the Journals World record for this post. Authors citing the journal should use the online ISSN for the digital edition and should check the article-level DOI, since the journal assigns DOIs and is recorded in DOAJ as operating a persistent identifier scheme based on DOI.

Origins and Development

Bone Research was founded in 2013, a point the publisher states plainly on the journal-information page. It began as an English-language periodical associated with Sichuan University and its West China School of Stomatology, an institution with a long history in dental, oral and craniofacial research. That origin matters for understanding the journal's character: bone biology sits at the meeting point of dentistry, orthopaedics, endocrinology and materials science, and the founding institution brought strengths in oral and craniofacial bone research that broadened into a general skeletal-biology remit.

The journal's stated aim, in the publisher's words, is to foster worldwide dissemination of research in bone-related physiology, pathology, diseases and treatment. Its DOAJ record dates its open access start to 2014 and shows the journal registered in the directory on 21 November 2014, so the open access identity was established early in its life rather than converted later. Early volumes had modest citation visibility — Journal Citation Reports figures summarised by secondary aggregators show an impact factor of 1.138 in 2014 rising through 3.581 in 2015 and 9.846 in 2016 — before the journal entered the very top tier of its field in the late 2010s. That trajectory is unusual and worth understanding: a young journal reaching double-digit impact factors within five years reflects a deliberate editorial strategy of soliciting authoritative reviews and breakthrough basic studies from leading laboratories, combined with the citation density of a fast-moving biomedical field.

Today the journal operates as part of the Nature Portfolio of open access titles. Articles appear on nature.com, benefit from that platform's production, archiving and discovery systems, and are free to read worldwide immediately on publication. The publisher reports 2,790,606 downloads in 2025, a usage figure that underlines how completely the readership of a specialist bone journal has become global once the paywall is removed.

Scope: What Bone Research Publishes

The official aims and scope describe a journal publishing, in its own phrasing, the foremost progress and novel understanding of all aspects of bone science, highlighting breakthrough discoveries in basic and clinical aspects of bone biology, pathophysiology and regeneration, together with other significant bone-related findings. The scope is deliberately comprehensive within its organ system: if the skeleton, cartilage or closely related mineralised tissue is the subject, the work is potentially in scope; if bone is incidental, it is not.

Original research articles are organised under headings that the publisher lists explicitly, and each heading defines a real editorial community within the journal:

• Morphogenesis of bone and cartilage — developmental biology of the skeleton, patterning, growth plate biology, and the genetic programmes that build and shape bone and cartilage.
• Musculoskeletal diseases — conditions affecting the integrated muscle–bone–joint system, including mechanistic and translational studies.
• Metabolic bone diseases — osteoporosis, disorders of mineral homeostasis, parathyroid and vitamin D related disease, and inherited metabolic conditions affecting the skeleton.
• Bone regeneration and bone tissue engineering — repair biology, stem and progenitor cell approaches, scaffolds, and strategies that restore structure and function after injury or disease.
• Bone related biomaterials — materials designed to interact with bone, including implants, graft substitutes and bioactive surfaces, where the biological evaluation is central.
• Clinical studies — patient-facing research that tests mechanisms, diagnostics or interventions in human skeletal disease.

The aims page adds that submissions are favoured regarding studies on the occurrence and development of bone and cartilage, bone metabolism, bone related diseases, bone regeneration and related biological materials. The DOAJ keyword record mirrors this list almost exactly — morphogenesis of bone and cartilage, musculoskeletal diseases, metabolic bone diseases, bone regeneration and bone tissue engineering, and bone related biomaterials — which is a useful consistency check between the publisher description and the directory record.

In practical terms the journal welcomes molecular, cellular, genetic, biomechanical and clinical work, provided the advance is conceptual as well as technical. A well-executed study that merely confirms known pathways in a new cell line is unlikely to clear the bar; a study that redefines how a pathway controls bone mass, identifies a new disease mechanism, or demonstrates a regenerative strategy with convincing in vivo evidence is the kind of contribution the scope language is written to attract. Review articles synthesise fields at moments of change, and correspondence and comments provide the shorter-form scholarly conversation.

Editorial Leadership and Governance

Leadership is shared across two continents, reflecting the journal's founding partnership. The Editors-in-Chief are Professor Xuedong Zhou and Professor Yun-Feng Lin, both of Sichuan University. The Founding Editor-in-Chief is Professor Xu Cao of Johns Hopkins University, whose laboratory is known for work on bone–vascular and neuro–skeletal interactions. The Executive Editors-in-Chief are Professor Thomas L. Clemens, also of Johns Hopkins University, and Professor Quan Yuan of Sichuan University. The publisher describes the wider board as an international group of distinguished researchers, with associate editors drawn from leading bone scientists inside and outside China.

For authors, the practical significance of this structure is twofold. First, editorial expertise covers the full scope, from developmental and molecular bone biology through to clinical and dental-craniofacial research, so manuscripts are likely to be assessed by editors who know the subfield literature closely. Second, the trans-Pacific leadership helps explain the journal's author and reader geography: submissions are encouraged from all parts of the world, in the publisher's words, and the journal explicitly strives for rapid review and publication of accepted manuscripts.

Peer Review and Editorial Speed

The journal is fully peer-reviewed. Its DOAJ record lists the review process as unspecified peer review and records plagiarism detection in place, with editorial information published on the Nature platform. The publisher's journal-information page provides the most concrete speed evidence available, and it is worth reading carefully because the two figures tell different stories. The median time from submission to first editorial decision is 7 days. That is an editorial triage figure: within about a week, authors learn whether the manuscript proceeds to external review or is declined without review. The median time from submission to acceptance is 208 days, which reflects the full journey of papers that survive — external review, revision, re-review and final decision. Authors budgeting a career timeline around this journal should plan on the second figure, not the first.

The DOAJ record separately lists a publication time of 20 weeks. That figure is not identical in definition to the publisher's median acceptance time, and the difference illustrates a general lesson used throughout this profile: speed statistics are only comparable when the start point, end point and population (all submissions versus accepted papers only) match. What can be said safely is that triage is fast, that the full process for accepted papers runs to several months, and that revision quality and responsiveness materially affect where an individual manuscript lands relative to the median.

Metrics: Reading the Numbers Carefully

An impact factor of 20.1 places Bone Research among the most cited journals in the life sciences generally, not only within bone biology. The five-year figure of 19.9, close to the two-year figure, indicates that citations are not dependent on a single exceptional year. The SJR of 4.815 weights citations by the prestige of the citing journals, so its similarly high value shows that the citing literature is itself influential. The h-index of 90 means ninety articles in the journal have each been cited at least ninety times — a depth measure that complements the averages.

Three cautions belong with these numbers. First, the Journals World record previously carried an impact factor of 14.3, which corresponds to an earlier reporting year; metrics move annually and the 20.1 figure should be cited with its 2025 year attached. Second, review-heavy journals in hot fields naturally accumulate citations faster than primary-research journals in slower fields, so cross-field comparisons mislead. Third, no metric substitutes for reading the journal: the best test of fit is whether the papers you cite most, and the community you want to reach, actually appear in its recent volumes. On that test, for skeletal biology, the journal's centrality is genuine.

Indexing and Discoverability

The publisher states that Bone Research is abstracted and indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Journal Citation Reports / Science Edition, PubMed Central (PMC), Scopus, Chemical Abstracts, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Each service matters differently. SCIE and Journal Citation Reports underpin the impact factor and satisfy institutional requirements in many countries. PubMed Central deposit makes the full text discoverable to the biomedical community and supports funder public-access compliance. Scopus coverage feeds a second family of metrics and evaluation systems. The DOAJ listing, verified directly against the DOAJ search API for this profile using the journal's online ISSN, confirms the open access credentials: CC BY licensing, author copyright retention, a stated article publishing charge, waiver availability, and CLOCKSS preservation.

Open Access, Charges and Licensing

Every article in Bone Research is open access on publication. The DOAJ record lists the article publishing charge maxima as USD 3,525, EUR 2,890 and GBP 2,590, and the Journals World record listed an APC of USD 3,405, a figure from an earlier price point. Charges change, currencies differ, and taxes or institutional agreements can alter what an individual author actually pays, so authors must confirm the current charge on the journal's open access page at the point of submission rather than relying on any directory figure, including this one. The DOAJ record confirms that a waiver policy exists, linked to the publisher's country-based waiver arrangements, and that authors retain copyright, with articles distributed under CC BY 4.0. That licence permits reuse, including commercial reuse, with attribution — the most permissive standard open licence, and the reason the journal's content propagates so widely into teaching, reviews and text-mining corpora.

How to Judge Fit and Submit Well

Fit for Bone Research turns on significance to the whole bone field, not only to a subfield. Before submitting, authors should be able to state, in two sentences, what was unknown about bone biology, disease or regeneration before the study and what the study establishes. Manuscripts whose advance is primarily methodological, or whose skeletal relevance is secondary to another organ system, usually belong elsewhere. Clinical studies need a mechanistic or decisively practice-relevant core. Biomaterials studies need rigorous biological evaluation, not characterisation alone.

Practical preparation follows the standard Nature Portfolio pattern: consult the journal's author instructions for article structure, reporting standards, data availability expectations and submission route through the publisher's online system; prepare figures that carry the central evidence legibly at publication size; write a cover letter that argues significance in the journal's own scope language without exaggeration; and ensure ethics approvals, consent statements and data identifiers are complete before submission, because administrative incompleteness delays triage regardless of scientific quality. Given the 7-day median first decision, an out-of-scope submission costs an author roughly a week, which makes an ambitious submission rational where the fit argument is honestly arguable — but repeated speculative submissions of plainly incremental work help no one.

Strengths, Limits and Alternatives

The journal's strengths are visibility, speed of triage, a genuinely field-defining readership in skeletal biology, and full open access with retained author copyright. Its limits are the other side of the same coin: selectivity is severe, the acceptance journey is long even when triage is fast, and the APC, while moderate for its tier, is a real cost where no institutional agreement or waiver applies. Authors whose work is strong but narrower in implication should consider the field's established society and specialist titles — for example the long-running journal Bone (a different title, despite the similar name), the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, or craniofacial and orthopaedic specialist journals — where a focused contribution can find its exact audience without needing a field-wide claim. Confusing Bone Research with Bone is a common citation error; the ISSNs and publishers differ entirely, and reference lists should be checked accordingly.

Readership and Community

The journal's community spans laboratory bone biologists, clinician-scientists in endocrinology, rheumatology, orthopaedics and dentistry, and the biomaterials and tissue-engineering groups whose work connects the two. That breadth is visible in the publisher's usage figures: nearly 2.8 million downloads in a single year for a specialist title indicates readership well beyond the citing core, extending into teaching, clinical reference and industry research. The journal's correspondence and comments format gives that community a venue for post-publication discussion, and its review programme functions as a rolling state-of-the-field record, which is one reason so many of its articles accumulate the citation counts reflected in the h-index of 90. Authors choosing the journal are therefore choosing an audience as much as a metric: a paper placed here is placed in front of the people who define skeletal biology's research agenda.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Bone Research fully open access? Yes. The publisher presents it as an open access journal, the DOAJ record confirms CC BY licensing and author-retained copyright, and all articles are free to read on the Nature platform.

What is the current impact factor? The publisher reports a Journal Impact Factor of 20.1 for 2025, with a five-year figure of 19.9. Older figures such as 14.3 reflect earlier years and should not be quoted as current.

Who publishes Bone Research? It is published in partnership with Springer Nature and the West China School of Stomatology, Sichuan University, with the International Chinese Musculoskeletal Research Society named as an associated institution in the DOAJ record. The stored Journals World publisher field for this record is a numeric code rather than a name; the partnership described here is the publisher identity given by the journal's own pages.

How long does review take? Publisher medians report 7 days to first editorial decision and 208 days from submission to acceptance for accepted papers. Individual experience varies with revision rounds.

Does the journal charge to publish? Yes, an article publishing charge applies; DOAJ lists maxima of USD 3,525 with euro and sterling equivalents, and waivers exist under the publisher's policy. Verify the live figure before submitting.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is based on the journal's official pages on nature.com (journal information, aims and scope), the DOAJ record retrieved through the DOAJ search API by exact online ISSN (confirming title, ISSN pair, publisher country, licensing, charges and preservation), the SCImago-derived figures reproduced on the publisher's metrics panel, and the Journals World record itself for the stored identifiers and earlier metric values. Where sources from different years disagree — as the impact factor values do — the profile reports the figure with its year and source rather than merging them into a single unsourced number. No figure in this profile is presented without an identified source.