Nature Microbiology

About Nature Microbiology

Nature Microbiology: Journal Profile

Nature Microbiology is a monthly, online-only, peer-reviewed journal published by Nature Portfolio, part of Springer Nature, and identified by the electronic ISSN 2058-5276. Launched in 2016, it publishes the best research from across the whole field of microbiology, with all editorial decisions made by a team of full-time professional editors. As a Nature Portfolio title, it occupies a specific niche: narrower than the multidisciplinary flagship Nature, broader than any sub-disciplinary microbiology journal, and highly selective, seeking work whose significance reaches microbiologists well beyond the author's immediate speciality. Its publisher-reported metrics — a Journal Impact Factor of 18.7 for 2025, more than six million article downloads in that year, and a median of seven days to a first editorial decision — describe a journal that is both influential and heavily oversubscribed. This profile explains, from the journal's own aims, metrics and editorial pages and from independent bibliometric sources, what it publishes, how it selects, what open access involves, and how authors should judge whether their manuscript belongs here or in a specialist venue where it may be better served.

At a Glance

Every metric above is dated, and the dates matter more than usual for this title: the journal's impact factor has moved substantially across the last decade of Journal Citation Reports releases, from the mid-teens at launch through a peak around the pandemic years to 18.7 for 2025, as the citation environment for microbiology — a field whose literature expanded and was cited at exceptional rates during the COVID-19 period — has normalised. Quoting any single year's figure without its year, as the JournalsWorld template this profile replaces did, invites exactly the confusion the metrics section below is written to prevent.

History, Publisher and Editorial Model

Nature Microbiology was established in 2016, part of a generation of Nature Portfolio subject journals created as fields outgrew the space available in the flagship titles. Microbiology was a natural candidate: microorganisms are, as the journal's own aims statement puts it, the most abundant living entities on the planet, fundamental to every aspect of life on Earth, and the field's methods — high-throughput sequencing, metagenomics, advanced imaging, genetic manipulation of previously intractable organisms — were producing results of general biological significance at a rate the general-science journals could not absorb.

The publisher is Nature Portfolio, the Nature-branded portfolio within Springer Nature, and SCImago records the publication country as the United Kingdom. The journal is online only and monthly, publishing continuously into monthly issues. Its editorial model differs from most society and commercial journals in a way authors must understand: editorial decisions are made by full-time professional editors employed by the publisher, specialists in the journal's subject areas who handle manuscripts as their primary occupation, supported — per the journal's own description — by an in-house team. Secondary sources record Susan Jones as editor-in-chief; authors should confirm current leadership on the journal's own about-the-editors page, since Nature Portfolio teams change over time. The practical significance of the professional-editor model is that triage is expert, fast and decisive, that editors actively commission and shape review and commentary content, and that appeals and presubmission enquiries are handled within a well-defined editorial office process rather than by an academic editor alongside laboratory duties.

Aims and Scope in Detail

The journal's aims and scope begin from the ubiquity of its subject: whether bacterial, viral, archaeal or eukaryotic, microorganisms affect the dynamics and function of every niche they inhabit, host-associated and environmental alike, and their diverse metabolic repertoire makes their activities critical at scales from global elemental biogeochemical cycles to the function of a single cell. Against that backdrop, Nature Microbiology declares an interest in all aspects of microorganisms — their evolution, physiology and cell biology; their interactions with each other, with a host or with an environment; and their societal significance. Its stated ambition is to provide a place where researchers and policymakers interested in microorganisms can come together to learn about the most accomplished and significant advances in the field and to discuss topical issues, and its broad scope is intended to carry published research to the widest possible audience of microbiologists.

The topic territory, as reflected in the journal's subject classification and published content, spans antimicrobials and antimicrobial resistance; microbial genetics and genomics; applied and industrial microbiology; archaea; bacteria; infectious diseases and clinical microbiology; biofilms; biodiversity and environmental microbiology; microbiomes of hosts and environments; molecular biology and biochemistry of microbes; omics approaches; biophysics; parasites; biotechnology; pathogenesis and host defence; cell biology; physiology; computational and systems biology; epidemiology and public health; evolution; symbiosis; fungi; viruses and vaccines; and the education and societal dimensions of the field. The unity is the organismal focus — microbes, their communities and their interactions — not any single technique or habitat.

Selectivity is the operative constraint. A Nature Portfolio research journal does not ask only whether a study is correct and competent; it asks whether the result represents a significant advance that microbiologists outside the subfield will want to know about. Local surveys, descriptive datasets without mechanistic or conceptual yield, incremental strain characterisations and confirmatory studies, however rigorous, are normally directed — often by the editors themselves, sometimes with an offer of transfer within the publisher's portfolio — to specialist journals. Conversely, work that reframes how a microbial process is understood, that resolves a contested mechanism, that opens a system to study for the first time, or that carries direct consequences for health, agriculture or environmental management, is the journal's core material, in bacteria, viruses, fungi, archaea and parasites alike.

Content and Article Types

Beyond primary research Articles, the journal publishes a substantial layer of commissioned and submitted secondary content visible in any current issue: Reviews, Perspectives, Comments and correspondence, News and Views-style discussion, and Journal Club pieces — including its series amplifying diverse voices, in which Journal Club articles by underrepresented author groups highlight past and present advances across microbiology. This matters to authors in two ways. First, the journal functions as a forum for the field's conversation, not only its data, so scientists with standing and something synthetic or argumentative to say have a route in that does not depend on a single new dataset. Second, the presence of professional editors who commission actively means unsolicited review proposals compete with commissioned plans; a short presubmission proposal that states the gap the piece fills is the professional way to test interest before writing in full.

Primary Articles are expected to present a complete, mechanistically satisfying story with evidence proportionate to the claims: appropriate genetic, biochemical, structural, imaging or computational support; careful controls; and, in microbiome and association studies, a disciplined separation of correlation from causation that the journal's readers and referees enforce strictly. Reporting expectations follow Nature Portfolio standards on methods, statistics, data and code availability, and reproducibility, and manuscripts should be built to those standards from the first draft rather than retrofitted after review.

Metrics and Standing, Read Carefully

The publisher's journal metrics page for Nature Microbiology reports, for 2025: a Journal Impact Factor of 18.7, a 5-year Journal Impact Factor of 20.8, an Immediacy Index of 5.1, an Eigenfactor Score of 0.05155, an Article Influence Score of 8.056, a Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) of 3.624 and an SJR of 7.440. Usage figures for 2025 record 6,143,801 downloads and 25,846 Altmetric mentions — numbers that reflect genuine readership reach, since a subscription journal's downloads are driven by institutional access and by its open access subset alike. SCImago classifies the journal Q1 in all six of its assigned categories, from Microbiology and Immunology to Cell Biology and Genetics.

The historical arc is instructive. JCR-derived series reproduced in secondary sources show the impact factor rising from 14.174 (2017) to a peak of 30.964 (2021), then easing through 28.3, 20.5 and 19.4 to 18.7 (2025). The peak coincides with the period when microbiology, and virology in particular, dominated global scientific attention and citation; the subsequent decline is a field-wide normalisation, visible across comparable titles, and not evidence of editorial change. Authors evaluating the journal today should use the current figure and the five-year figure together: the latter, at 20.8, better represents the citation life of a paper that will accumulate attention over several years.

Independent databases again provide consistent direction with different arithmetic. OpenAlex, fetched directly by source identifier for this profile (source S2764926557), records 2,925 works and 241,043 citations for the journal, with an h-index of 222 and an i10-index of 1,875 in its summary statistics. As with the other profiles in this batch, OpenAlex also produced an unstable alternative reading for this ISSN during preparation — an earlier query returned a different source record with sharply different counts that could not be confirmed on direct fetch — so only the directly fetched record is used here, and readers should expect OpenAlex values to shift as its corpus is reprocessed. Scopus-derived h-index values quoted by aggregator sites differ again, for the familiar reason that Scopus and OpenAlex index different document sets. None of this undermines the central, multiply corroborated fact: by any provider's arithmetic, this is one of the most influential journals in microbiology.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal is abstracted and indexed in PubMed, the Science Citation Index Expanded within Web of Science, and Scopus, per its reference listings — the three services that jointly determine discoverability and citation counting for most biomedical institutions. For a microbiology author, PubMed indexing in particular places mechanistic and clinical work in front of the biomedical readership beyond the microbiology core, which suits the journal's cross-audience ambition. Articles are published online in Nature Portfolio's standard format with article-level metrics — downloads, citations and attention — displayed on each article page, supporting the publisher's stated position, as a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), that journal-level metrics should be read alongside article-level evidence rather than as a substitute for it.

Access Model and Open Access Costs

Nature Microbiology is a subscription journal with an open access option — the hybrid model standard across Nature Portfolio research titles. Authors may publish under the subscription route, in which the article is available to subscribers and no publication fee is charged, or elect open access on acceptance, in which case an article processing charge applies and the article is made freely available under a Creative Commons licence. The JournalsWorld template previously listed a figure of $12,690.00 as this journal's charge; that figure is consistent with Nature Portfolio's standard open access charge level for its research journals as reported in secondary analyses, but it could not be verified against a journal-specific fee page during the preparation of this profile, and Nature Portfolio charges are revised periodically and vary by journal. It is therefore reported here as an unverified secondary figure only, and authors budgeting an open access submission must confirm the current charge on the journal's own open access and fees pages at the time of submission. Funder mandates should be checked with equal care: many funders accept hybrid open access under transformative agreements between Springer Nature and institutions or consortia, while others impose licence or venue conditions that a subscription-route article would not satisfy.

Editorial Process and Timelines

The publisher reports a median of seven days from submission to first editorial decision and 241 days from submission to acceptance. The gap between those two numbers is the defining feature of the process. The first decision is the in-house editors' triage: most submissions end there, quickly, on grounds of fit and significance rather than technical fault, and authors should plan for that probability honestly when choosing where to submit first. Manuscripts sent for review enter a demanding external refereeing process, typically involving multiple rounds of revision for the minority that progress, which — combined with author revision time — accounts for the roughly eight-month median journey to acceptance. The journal's own metrics page reminds readers, in the context of its DORA commitment, that citation measures are not measures of quality for individual articles; the same realism should be applied to timelines, which are medians across many manuscripts and not a schedule promised to any one of them.

Practical consequences follow. A presubmission enquiry, with an abstract and a clear statement of the advance, is a legitimate and efficient way to test fit at a journal with this triage profile. Cover letters should make the significance case in terms intelligible across microbiology, not only within the subfield, because that breadth judgement is precisely what the first decision turns on. And authors on fixed deadlines — thesis submission, grant reporting, priority-sensitive findings — should weigh the expected value of an attempt here, including the likely time cost of a triage or post-review rejection and resubmission elsewhere, against the substantial visibility premium of success.

Preparing a Competitive Submission

Begin with the significance test, applied unsentimentally: if the finding were announced in a seminar to microbiologists from other subfields, would it change what they think or do? If the answer depends on specialist context to land, a leading specialist journal — where the same work may become a field reference — is usually the better home, and editors at this journal will frequently say so. Where the test is passed, the manuscript must carry the argument explicitly: a title and abstract that state the conceptual advance, an introduction that sets up the open question for a broad reader, and a discussion that draws out implications beyond the immediate system without overclaiming them.

On evidence, anticipate the standard referee challenges in this journal's territory: genetic perturbations without complementation or with unexamined polar effects; omics datasets whose analysis pipeline and statistics are underspecified; microbiome conclusions drawn from relative abundance alone; structural or imaging claims without quantification; and host-interaction studies whose model limitations go unacknowledged. Data, code and materials availability statements should be complete at submission, both because Nature Portfolio policy requires them and because incompleteness at triage signals a manuscript that is not ready. For review-type content, propose before writing: a one-page outline showing the synthesis, the gap relative to existing reviews and the authors' standing in the area gives the editors what they need to encourage or redirect the piece efficiently.

Is This Journal Right for Your Paper?

Choose Nature Microbiology when your work delivers a significant, broadly interesting advance about microorganisms — mechanistic, ecological, evolutionary, clinical or societal — supported by evidence strong enough to satisfy referees from adjacent subfields, and when the reach of the Nature Portfolio audience, including policymakers and the wider biomedical readership the journal explicitly courts, is worth a selective process and a long median path to acceptance. Choose a specialist venue when the contribution is deep but narrow, primarily descriptive, methodologically routine, or needed in the literature quickly; the field's specialist journals include excellent titles whose citation audiences are precisely the people who will build on the work. The two-decision structure of this journal — a fast, expert no for most, a thorough and potentially transformative yes for a few — rewards authors who match the manuscript to the venue with clear eyes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Nature Microbiology? The electronic ISSN is 2058-5276. The journal is online only, so there is no print ISSN; the absence of one in a catalogue record is expected, not an error.

Who publishes Nature Microbiology? Nature Portfolio, part of Springer Nature. The JournalsWorld record previously rendered the publisher as a bare number, which was a database artefact; the correct publisher is Nature Portfolio.

What is the journal's impact factor? The publisher reports 18.7 for 2025, with a 5-year figure of 20.8. Earlier years were higher — peaking at 30.964 in 2021 in JCR-derived series — so always quote the figure with its year.

Is Nature Microbiology open access? It is a hybrid journal: a subscription route with no author fee, and an open access option on acceptance for an article processing charge. Confirm the current charge on the journal's own pages, as the figure in older directory listings could not be verified journal-specifically for this profile.

How long does the process take? Publisher-reported medians are seven days to a first editorial decision and 241 days from submission to acceptance. Most submissions are decided at the first, triage stage.

How does it differ from Nature Reviews Microbiology and Nature Communications? Nature Microbiology publishes primary research and discussion focused on microbiology; Nature Reviews Microbiology is a separate reviews journal with different ISSNs; Nature Communications is a fully open access multidisciplinary journal with a broader remit and a different selectivity profile. Checking title and ISSN before submitting avoids misdirection.

Sources and Verification

This profile was prepared from Nature Microbiology's own aims and scope text and journal metrics page on nature.com (impact factor, five-year figure, SNIP, SJR, speed and usage statistics for 2025, and the journal's online-only, professional-editor model); SCImago category and quartile information as summarised in secondary sources; a direct OpenAlex source fetch (source S2764926557), used with the instability caveat described in the metrics section; reference listings confirming indexing in PubMed, Science Citation Index Expanded and Scopus; and the journal's JournalsWorld REST record, whose stored publisher field rendered as a bare number and whose undated metrics were superseded as described in the text. The open access charge figure in the replaced template is reported as unverified, as explained in the access section.