Nature Geoscience

About Nature Geoscience

Nature Geoscience: Journal Profile

Nature Geoscience is a monthly journal in the Nature Portfolio, published by Springer Nature, that carries top-quality research across the whole spectrum of the Earth sciences. Launched in January 2008, it was created to give the geosciences a selective, high-visibility home of the same kind that Nature itself provides for science generally: a single venue in which a climate modeller, a seismologist, a geochemist and a planetary scientist can each expect to find the month's most consequential work in the others' fields. Editorial decisions are made by a team of full-time professional editors rather than by practising academics handling manuscripts alongside their research, which shapes both the journal's selectivity and its speed at the first decision stage.

The journal appears in this profile under its current publisher branding, Nature Portfolio. Older records — including the previous JournalsWorld template for this title — name the Nature Publishing Group, the portfolio's earlier name, or reduce the publisher to a garbled number followed by the United Kingdom. The underlying facts have been stable throughout: this is a Springer Nature journal, based in the United Kingdom, with the print ISSN 1752-0894 and electronic ISSN 1752-0908 stated on the journal's own information page.

At a Glance

Aims and Scope

The journal's own aims statement frames its mission around a planetary question: understanding the Earth's history and its future evolution is becoming ever more important as human influence on climate and landscapes, the oceans and the atmosphere expands. Against that backdrop, Nature Geoscience describes itself as a monthly multi-disciplinary journal bringing together top-quality research across the entire spectrum of the Earth sciences, together with relevant work in related areas. Its content reflects all the disciplines within the geosciences, and encompasses field work, modelling and theoretical studies alike — a deliberate refusal to privilege one method of knowing the Earth over others.

The topic list the journal publishes is the best map of its territory. It covers atmospheric science; biogeochemistry; climate science; geobiology; geochemistry; geoinformatics and remote sensing; geology; geomagnetism and palaeomagnetism; geomorphology; geophysics; glaciology; hydrology and limnology; mineralogy and mineral physics; oceanography; palaeontology; palaeoclimatology and palaeoceanography; petrology; planetary science; seismology; space physics; tectonics; and volcanology. Two features of that list deserve emphasis. First, planetary science and space physics extend the journal beyond the Earth itself, to the other bodies whose study illuminates terrestrial processes. Second, the climate-related disciplines — atmospheric science, climate science, palaeoclimatology, oceanography, glaciology, biogeochemistry — form a substantial share of what the journal actually publishes, reflecting where the field's most consequential and most cited questions currently sit.

What the Journal Publishes

Primary research Articles are the core, held to the Nature Portfolio standard of significant, high-quality research assessed through a peer review process the journal describes as fair, rapid and rigorous, overseen by its professional editors. Around them sits an interpretive layer that distinguishes the journal from a pure research archive: Review Articles that consolidate a subfield, News and Views pieces that explain new results to non-specialists in adjacent disciplines, Research Highlights that draw attention to significant papers elsewhere, Commentaries on matters of policy and practice, and reviews of relevant books and arts events. For readers, this front matter is often the most efficient way to track the whole Earth science landscape; for authors, it is worth remembering that much of it is commissioned or written by the editors rather than submitted speculatively.

The professional-editor model deserves explanation for authors used to society journals. Manuscripts are first read by in-house editors — scientists by training, employed full-time by the publisher — who decide whether a paper goes to external review at all. That first editorial decision is fast: the journal's metrics page reports a median of 9 days from submission to first editorial decision. Papers that clear it are reviewed by external referees chosen by the editors. The same metrics page reports a median of 247 days from submission to acceptance, a figure that includes revision time and illustrates the real economics of the venue: the initial answer comes quickly, but acceptance, for the minority of papers that achieve it, follows the full cycle of review, revision and re-review.

The Journal in Its Field

Before 2008, a geoscientist with a career-defining result faced an awkward choice between the family's generalist flagship, where Earth science competes with every other discipline for a handful of slots, and the disciplinary journals, whose readerships stop at subfield boundaries. Nature Geoscience was launched to occupy the space between: selective like a flagship, but edited by and for the Earth science community, and able to assume a reader who knows what a subduction zone or an isotope ratio is. Its launch completed a pattern the publisher had been building with subject-specific Nature titles in the life and physical sciences, and the geoscience version has proved one of the most durable, publishing monthly without interruption since its first issue.

That positioning explains the journal's research mix in practice. Climate science and its neighbours dominate the high-attention end of its content — attribution of extreme weather, carbon-cycle feedbacks, ice-sheet behaviour, ocean circulation change — because those are the questions where a result in one subfield immediately matters to several others, and to audiences outside academia altogether. The publisher's usage figures make the point concretely: nearly four million downloads and close to seventeen thousand Altmetric mentions in a single year is the signature of a journal whose papers are read by journalists, cited in policy documents and taught in classrooms, not only cited by specialists. At the same time the journal continues to publish deep-time and solid-Earth work — mantle structure, early Earth geochemistry, planetary interiors — where the timescale of influence is longer but the standard, reframing a process rather than documenting an instance of it, is the same.

The publisher's note that over half of the journal's 2025 articles related to one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals follows from this mix. Earth science underpins the goals concerned with climate action, water, oceans, land ecosystems and sustainable communities, and a journal whose pages carry the carbon budget literature, drought and flood attribution, and sea-level projections will inevitably register against them. Springer Nature presents this as part of its wider commitment as a signatory of the SDG Publishers Compact; for readers of this profile, the practical meaning is simpler — the journal's content is unusually likely to be relevant to the applied questions that funders and assessment exercises ask about.

How Editorial Selection Works

Authors often ask what the professional editors are looking for at the first read, and the journal's own framing supplies the answer: significant, high-quality research whose importance extends across the Earth sciences or speaks to the large questions — the Earth's history and its future evolution under growing human influence — that the journal exists to address. Editors weigh novelty, rigour and reach together. A technically flawless paper confirming an established relationship will generally lose, at triage, to a riskier paper that, if right, changes a budget, a timescale or a mechanism that other subfields depend on. Referees are then asked to judge correctness and to comment on significance, and editors may consult several specialists across disciplines for a paper that straddles them.

Two practical consequences follow. First, the covering letter and abstract carry unusual weight, because the first decision is made by editors reading across the whole field, quickly — hence the reported median of nine days to that decision. Second, rejection at triage is not a judgement that the work is weak; the journal declines most submissions, including many it expects to be well cited in disciplinary venues, because its monthly page budget is small relative to the volume of strong geoscience produced worldwide. Authors should plan a cascade — the disciplinary journal they will approach next — before they submit, rather than after a decision arrives.

Editorial Leadership

The journal's Chief Editor is Tamara Goldin, who took over from Heike Langenberg in February 2020. The journal information page states that all editorial decisions are made by its team of full-time professional editors, and its editor pages list senior editors based in the United Kingdom and China among the handling team. For authors, the practical consequence is that presubmission enquiries are a normal and useful part of the process at Nature Portfolio titles: a concise enquiry describing the finding and its wider significance lets the editors signal whether a full submission is likely to be considered, saving months when the answer is negative.

Metrics and Standing

The publisher maintains a dedicated metrics page for the journal, and its 2025 figures — stated here with their source — are the authoritative ones for this profile. Journal Impact Factor: 20.6 (2025). Five-year Journal Impact Factor: 21.7 (2025). Immediacy Index: 3.4 (2025). Eigenfactor score: 0.04403 (2025). Article Influence Score: 8.106 (2025). Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP): 4.544 (2025). SCImago Journal Rank (SJR): 6.141 (2025). Usage figures for 2025 are equally striking: 3,939,254 downloads and 16,848 Altmetric mentions, the latter reflecting how often the journal's climate and hazards research is taken up by news media and policy documents. The publisher also notes that over 50 per cent of the articles published in the journal in 2025 were related to one or more of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Independently computed bibliometrics tell the same story at a different scale. OpenAlex (source S48977010, consulted directly for this profile) records 5,053 works in the journal, cited 510,670 times, with an OpenAlex h-index of 339 and 3,002 works cited at least ten times. SCImago's h-index for the journal, as carried in the previous JournalsWorld record, is 297. The difference between 339 and 297 is not an error in either service: OpenAlex counts a broader set of document types and citing sources than the Scopus corpus on which SCImago rests. Readers comparing journals should compare like with like — one database's figures against the same database's figures for a rival title — and should treat the publisher's Clarivate and SCImago panel above as the reference numbers for this journal. One small OpenAlex quirk is worth flagging for the record: its source record gives a first publication year of 2007, whereas the journal launched in January 2008; the earlier date appears to reflect pre-launch or advance material in the underlying data.

Third-party aggregator sites quote a confusing spread of impact factors for this journal — figures from about 12 to over 20 can be found, corresponding to different Journal Citation Reports years, to impact-like scores computed by the aggregators themselves, or to stale copies of one another. The publisher's metrics page, quoted above, is the corrective: 20.6 for 2025, with the five-year figure of 21.7 showing that the journal's papers sustain their citation rate beyond the standard two-year window.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal is abstracted and indexed in the services that matter for Earth science: the Science Citation Index and Current Contents for Physical, Chemical and Earth Sciences within the Web of Science, Scopus, Chemical Abstracts Service, CAB Abstracts and GeoRef, among others. Article-level metrics — citations, downloads and online attention — are displayed on each article page for everything published from 2010 onward. As a subscription title with an optional open access route, the journal is not a Directory of Open Access Journals title: a direct DOAJ search by both its print ISSN (1752-0894) and its electronic ISSN (1752-0908), carried out for this profile, returned no listing, and OpenAlex records the same position.

Open Access and Charges

Authors may publish under the traditional subscription route at no charge, or choose open access for their article on payment of an article processing charge. Bibliographic records of the charge vary by year and source, as they do for most large publishers: OpenAlex's pricing record for the journal gives US$12,690 for 2025, with sterling and euro figures of £9,190 and €10,690, while other listings of the journal's metrics have quoted slightly different amounts for adjacent years. The operative figure is always the one on the journal's own pages at the moment of acceptance, and authors at institutions with Springer Nature read-and-publish agreements may have the charge covered centrally. No charge figure from a third-party site — including the figures quoted here for orientation — should be budgeted without checking the current journal page.

Who Should Publish Here — and Who Should Not

The journal suits work that changes how a whole subfield, or several subfields, understand the Earth system: a reconstruction that rewrites a climate interval, a geochemical result that settles a contested process, a hazard or carbon-cycle finding with direct implications beyond its discipline, a planetary result that reframes terrestrial analogues. The common thread is significance that survives translation — a non-specialist editor, and then readers from other geoscience disciplines, must be able to see why the result matters.

Work that is excellent but local — a superb regional mapping study, a careful single-site record, a method refinement of interest chiefly to one technique's practitioners — will usually be better placed in a strong disciplinary journal, where its natural referees and readers concentrate, than in a venue whose first filter is breadth of significance. That is a statement about fit, not quality, and the journal's fast first decision means a speculative submission costs an author little more than a week.

Practical Submission Notes

Write the presubmission enquiry and the abstract for the cross-disciplinary reader: name the advance in the first sentence, quantify it, and state what it changes. Follow the Nature Portfolio formatting and reporting requirements exactly, including data availability — geoscience referees and editors expect underlying data, code and sample information to be deposited and cited, and palaeoclimate, geochemical and modelling claims in particular are checked against what a reader could reproduce. Choose the open access route deliberately rather than by default, confirming funder requirements and institutional agreement coverage before acceptance.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did Nature Geoscience start? It was established in January 2008 and has published monthly since.

What is its impact factor? 20.6 for 2025, with a five-year impact factor of 21.7, from the publisher's journal metrics page using Clarivate data. Figures quoted elsewhere usually correspond to earlier years.

Who edits the journal? A team of full-time professional editors employed by the publisher, led by Chief Editor Tamara Goldin, in post since February 2020.

How fast is a first decision? The publisher reports a median of 9 days from submission to first editorial decision, and a median of 247 days from submission to acceptance.

Is it open access? It is a subscription journal with an optional open access route for individual articles on payment of a charge; check the journal's current page for the operative amount and for institutional agreement coverage.

Sources and Verification

This profile is based on the journal's own pages on nature.com — its journal information page (ISSN, abbreviation, editorial model), its aims and scope page (mission, methods and the full topic list), and its journal metrics page (all 2025 citation, speed and usage figures, and the Sustainable Development Goals statement) — together with OpenAlex source S48977010, consulted directly, for independently computed bibliometrics and the pricing record discussed above; SCImago-derived figures as carried in the journal's existing record; and DOAJ searches by print and electronic ISSN, which returned no listing. The editorship history is as recorded in the journal's reference entry. The previous JournalsWorld template reduced the publisher to a number in its running text while naming the Nature Publishing Group — the portfolio's former branding — in its structured data; the current branding, Nature Portfolio, is used throughout this profile.