About Nature Metabolism

Nature Metabolism — Full Journal Profile

Nature Metabolism is a selective Nature Portfolio journal, published by Springer Nature, devoted to metabolism research in its full breadth — from fundamental cell biology to basic biomedical and translational research. Launched in January 2019, it publishes work that significantly advances understanding of metabolic and homeostatic processes, whether the setting is a single cell, an organ, a whole organism or a patient population. Its ISSN is 2522-5812. On this Journals World record (post 968, slug nature-metabolism), identity is anchored by that ISSN and by the journal's site at nature.com/natmetab.

Metabolism sits at the centre of some of the largest health burdens in the world — diabetes, obesity and fatty liver disease — and at the centre of basic questions about how cells sense nutrients, produce energy and decide what to become. Before 2019 that work was scattered across cell-biology, physiology, endocrinology and general-science journals. Nature Metabolism gave it a flagship of its own, edited from the publisher's Berlin hub, and it was an immediate success: its first two-year impact factor, announced by the journal, was 13.5, and current listings report a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 27.5 with Q1 standing in Endocrinology & Metabolism. This profile sets out the journal's verified identity, history, scope, editorial leadership, metrics, indexing, charges and submission process, attributing each figure to its source.

Quick Facts

History and Development

Nature Metabolism was announced by Springer Nature in 2018, together with Nature Machine Intelligence and Nature Reviews Physics, as part of an expansion of the Nature-branded portfolio into fast-growing fields. The announcement named Dr Christoph Schmitt — formerly a senior editor and team manager at Nature Communications, where he had handled metabolic research — as Chief Editor, based at Nature Research's new Berlin hub. The journal published its first issue in January 2019 and has appeared monthly online since.

The timing proved astute. The journal's early years coincided with an explosion of interest in immunometabolism, cancer metabolism, the gut microbiome's metabolic role, and the physiology of obesity and diabetes — including, from 2020, the metabolic dimensions of COVID-19, where a Nature Metabolism paper showing that SARS-CoV-2 infects and replicates in cells of the human endocrine and exocrine pancreas became one of its most cited. The editors have marked the journal's development publicly: they announced pride in a first two-year impact factor of 13.5, and subsequent cycles climbed steeply as the journal's denominator filled with heavily cited papers — current JCR-based listings report 27.5 for the 2025 cycle, among the highest figures of any specialised life-science journal. The journal has also invested in community standards, for example through its Collection on improving reproducibility of metabolic research, which highlights best practices in experimental design, analysis and reporting for the field.

Editorially, the journal has kept the classic Nature structure since launch: no external editorial board, decisions made by a dedicated team of professional editors, and a chief editor with a research background in the field — Schmitt studied pharmacy at Heidelberg, took his doctorate at the University of Vienna, and did postdoctoral work at University College London on mitochondrial function and the links between cellular energy metabolism and cell proliferation before joining Nature Research in 2010. That continuity of leadership, unusual among newer journals, is part of why the journal's scope has stayed coherent as it has grown.

Aims and Scope in Detail

The journal's official scope statement says that Nature Metabolism publishes work from across all fields of metabolism research that significantly advances understanding of metabolic and homeostatic processes in a cellular or broader physiological context, from fundamental cell biology to basic biomedical and translational research. At its core, the research it publishes sheds light on how cellular metabolism informs cellular function; on the physiology and homeostasis of organs and tissues; on the regulation of organismal energy homeostasis; and on the molecular pathophysiology of metabolic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity, and their treatment.

The topic list published with that statement divides into two families. The cell-biology family includes nutrient sensing; metabolic pathways, networks and fluxes; mitochondrial biology; metabolic regulation of post-translational modifications; autophagy and proteostasis; redox signalling; senescence; cancer metabolism; stem cell metabolism; immune cell metabolism; microbial metabolism and biotechnology; and plant metabolism. The integrative-physiology and biomedical family includes the physiology of metabolic tissues — adipose tissue, pancreas, liver, gut and muscle; hormonal, neuronal, immunological and microbial regulation of organismal energy homeostasis; metabolic diseases such as diabetes, obesity and NAFLD/NASH (fatty liver disease); and the translational work that connects mechanism to therapy. The launch announcement framed the same territory with examples: cellular metabolism, aging, circadian rhythms and dietary health alongside diabetes and obesity.

Two scope judgements follow for authors. First, the journal is interested in metabolism as the mechanism, not as background: a cancer, immunology or neuroscience paper belongs here when its central advance is metabolic — a rewired pathway, a metabolite acting as a signal, a flux change that explains a phenotype. Second, the journal spans levels deliberately, so work that connects a molecular mechanism to organ or organismal physiology, or a human observation to a testable mechanism, matches its identity especially well. Like the other Nature research journals, it is characterised by a dedicated team of professional editors, a fair and rigorous peer-review process, high standards of copy-editing and production, swift publication and editorial independence — the formula its scope statement closes with.

Article Types

Nature Metabolism publishes primary research (Articles and shorter formats used across the portfolio, including Letters and Resources), plus Reviews, Perspectives, Comments, News & Views and editorials; the launch announcement listed Reviews, Commentaries, Features, Perspectives and News & Views among its commissioned forms. Its recent issues show the mix in practice — full Articles and Resources alongside Letters, Comments on method standards (for example, standardising analysis and visualisation of human energy-expenditure data), and editorials on community practices such as co-submission of complementary studies. Resources — datasets, atlases, tools and reference measurements the field will reuse — are a real category here, not an afterthought: the journal's most cited paper is a community guidelines article, and its reproducibility Collection signals how much weight the editors give to methodological contributions that raise standards across metabolic research.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

Chief Editor Christoph Schmitt has led Nature Metabolism since 2018, when he was appointed to prepare the journal for its 2019 launch; the journal's own "About the Editors" page records that he joined Nature Research in 2010 as an editor for the Nature Reviews journals, moved to Nature Communications in 2012 where he managed a team handling biomedical and translational research including metabolism, and became Chief Editor of Nature Metabolism in 2018. The same page states the structural fact authors most need: like the other Nature titles, Nature Metabolism has no external editorial board, and all editorial decisions are made by a dedicated team of professional editors with relevant research and editorial backgrounds. Senior editors named on that page include Yanina-Yasmin Pesch and Revati Dewal, both based in the Berlin office; the journal's contact page lists its editorial office at Heidelberger Platz 3, 14197 Berlin, Germany, with general editorial contact at metabolism@nature.com and submissions and presubmission enquiries handled only through the online submission system, not by email.

The editorial philosophy Schmitt has described for the journal emphasises informative decisions: the team works to make rejection and revision letters genuinely useful — explaining the reasoning rather than forwarding bare referee comments — and it operates the portfolio's consultation route, in which a paper not suited to Nature Metabolism can be steered, with author agreement, toward a more suitable Nature Portfolio journal. The journal states that it publishes only rigorous, reproducible work of significant impact, and its reproducibility Collection is the public face of that standard. Median timelines reported for the journal (see metrics below) are fast at the first decision and measured in months to acceptance, the normal signature of a selective professional-editor journal.

Metrics and What They Mean

Current listings based on Journal Citation Reports report a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 27.5 and a 5-year Journal Impact Factor of 28.5 for Nature Metabolism, with Q1 standing in the Endocrinology & Metabolism category and Science Citation Index Expanded coverage; those listings state that their figures were checked against the journal's publisher metrics page, which also reports speed medians of 7 days from submission to first editorial decision and 204 days from submission to acceptance. This record's earlier template also displayed 27.5, and in this case the template figure agrees with the current reported cycle — the exception rather than the rule in this batch, where most template metrics proved stale. On Scopus-derived measures, current SCImago-based listings report an SJR of 9.602, a CiteScore of 32.1, an h-index of 113, and Q1 rankings in Cell Biology; Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism; Internal Medicine; and Physiology (medical).

OpenAlex tells the same story on its own counting rules: 1,648 works and 88,085 citations (source S4210232714, fetched directly in October 2026), an h-index of 147, 895 works cited at least ten times, and a two-year mean citedness of about 18.3 — an average citation rate per recent paper that few specialised journals anywhere match. The gap between the SCImago h-index (113) and the OpenAlex h-index (147) is again a database-coverage effect, not a discrepancy to be averaged away; cite the one your evaluator uses. The journal's most-cited papers, per research-aggregator profiles, are led by the 2022 community guidelines for measuring reactive oxygen species and oxidative damage in cells and in vivo (about 1,488 citations in that listing), followed by a review of skeletal muscle energy metabolism during exercise (about 772), the essay "We need to talk about the Warburg effect" (about 622), work on non-alcoholic fatty liver disease at the meeting point of metabolism, microbes and immunity (about 556), and the 2021 paper on SARS-CoV-2 infection of the human pancreas (about 529). The list captures the journal's range in miniature: standards, physiology, cancer metabolism, liver disease and infection — all unified by mechanism.

Indexing and Discoverability

Nature Metabolism is indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (Science Citation Index Expanded) and in Scopus, and aggregator listings additionally record coverage in PubMed and Embase, reflecting its biomedical readership; articles appear on nature.com with DOIs in the 10.1038/s42255- series, full metadata and article-level metrics. Coverage in Scopus runs from 2019, the launch year, to the present. A DOAJ search for ISSN 2522-5812 returns no listing, as expected for a hybrid journal whose default route is subscription publication; this is a statement about the access model, not about the journal's standing, which its impact factor and SJR settle independently.

Open Access and Charges

Authors may publish under the traditional subscription route at no charge, or choose open access on acceptance for an article processing charge. OpenAlex records the journal's open-access charge as US$12,690 — the same value it records for its sister title Nature Aging, reflecting the Nature Portfolio's standard pricing band for its selective hybrid titles — and this record's earlier template displayed US$12,290, a slightly older figure consistent with a previous pricing cycle. Treat the publisher's current price list as governing: charges are revised between cycles, and the operative amount is the one quoted by the editorial office at acceptance. Funder mandates (for example, immediate open access under a Creative Commons licence) should be checked before submission, and authors covered by institutional Springer Nature open-access agreements may have the charge handled centrally.

How to Submit and What to Expect

Submit through the Nature Portfolio online system linked from the journal's site; do not email complete manuscripts to the editorial office, which the contact page explicitly discourages. Presubmission enquiries are welcomed and are the fastest way to test fit for borderline work. In the manuscript itself, follow Nature formatting: a title and abstract that state the metabolic advance for a broad readership, results organised around the mechanism, methods sufficient for replication, and the portfolio's required data-availability, code-availability, competing-interest and author-contribution statements. Expect the editors' stated reproducibility standards to be applied concretely — metabolic research has known pitfalls (Seahorse and flux measurements, ROS assays, diet and housing conditions in animal work) on which this journal's community guidelines and referee pool are particularly well informed, and papers that pre-empt those questions move faster. Reported medians — 7 days to first editorial decision, 204 days to acceptance — mean that a desk decision, positive or negative, arrives quickly, while accepted papers should budget for substantial revision.

Is Nature Metabolism the Right Venue for Your Paper?

Choose Nature Metabolism when metabolism is the discovery: a nutrient-sensing mechanism, a mitochondrial or redox finding with physiological consequence, a tissue-communication pathway that reorganises how energy homeostasis is understood, or a disease study in diabetes, obesity or fatty liver disease whose mechanism changes therapeutic thinking. The journal rewards cross-level work — molecule to organ to organism — and community resources that raise the field's standards. It is a weaker fit for descriptive profiling without mechanism, for clinical studies whose metabolic content is incidental, and for solid but specialist work that will be read mainly within one sub-community; the wider Nature Portfolio and the society journals in endocrinology and cell biology offer better-matched homes for those papers, and the editors' consultation route exists precisely to redirect them without losing the reviews already obtained.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Nature Metabolism? 2522-5812, used for the journal's online edition and recorded identically across OpenAlex, SCImago and the publisher.

When was Nature Metabolism launched? Its first issue appeared in January 2019; it was announced in 2018 with Christoph Schmitt named as founding Chief Editor, based in Berlin.

What is the journal's impact factor? Listings based on Journal Citation Reports report 27.5 for the 2025 cycle and a 5-year figure of 28.5, with Q1 standing in Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Who is the Chief Editor? Christoph Schmitt, a former Nature Communications senior editor and team manager, who became Chief Editor in 2018 to prepare the launch and leads a team of professional editors in Berlin; the journal has no external editorial board.

Is Nature Metabolism open access? It is a hybrid journal: subscription publication is free to authors, and an optional open-access route carries a charge recorded by OpenAlex as US$12,690. It is not listed in DOAJ, which covers fully open-access journals only.

How fast are decisions? Reported medians are 7 days from submission to first editorial decision and 204 days from submission to acceptance.

Where is the journal based? Its editorial office is in Berlin, Germany, per the publisher's contact page (Heidelberger Platz 3, 14197 Berlin), and this Journals World record's taxonomy likewise lists the country as Germany, with the publisher term recorded as "Springer Berlin". The record's earlier template text said the United Kingdom, and OpenAlex records the source country as GB — both at odds with the Berlin office and the stored taxonomy.

Sources and Verification

This profile was compiled from the journal's official scope statement as published on nature.com and reproduced in publisher subscription materials; Springer Nature's 2018 launch announcement naming the founding Chief Editor; the journal's official "About the Editors" and contact pages on nature.com (editorship, Berlin office, submission route); the OpenAlex source record S4210232714 fetched directly in October 2026 (works, citations, h-index, APC); SCImago-derived listings for SJR, CiteScore, quartiles and h-index; Journal Citation Reports-based listings whose figures are stated to have been checked against the publisher metrics page (impact factor, 5-year figure, decision medians); research-aggregator profiles for most-cited papers; and a DOAJ search for the ISSN (no listing, consistent with the hybrid model). Where sources conflict — the country attributed to the journal, and small differences in the recorded open-access charge between cycles — the conflict is stated in the text. Verified October 2026.