Nature Plants

About Nature Plants

Nature Plants — Journal Profile

Nature Plants is an online-only, monthly research journal in the Nature Portfolio, published by Springer Nature, devoted to the best research on plants — from their evolution, development, metabolism and environmental interactions to their societal significance, in the journal's own description on its official journal information page. It was launched in 2015, with its first issue appearing in January of that year, and it was presented by its publisher at launch as the first journal in the field to focus on excellence in research across the whole of the plant sciences, building on the cross-disciplinary model of other Nature Portfolio titles. Its print ISSN is 2055-026X and its electronic ISSN is 2055-0278; the journal itself confirms the electronic ISSN on its information page and gives its correct abbreviation as Nat. Plants. The record on this site gives the same two ISSNs and a United Kingdom country, and it lists coverage as “2010, 2015-2026”. That coverage line needs explanation rather than repetition: it is a bibliographic database coverage pattern, not the journal's history. The journal did not exist in 2010. Its own history begins in 2015, and a profile that described it as publishing since 2010 would be wrong. The stored publisher field is also faulty in format — it is a number, 21, rather than a name. The publisher is Springer Nature, through its Nature Portfolio imprint; the numeric value is a record defect.

Quick facts

• Title: Nature Plants (abbreviation: Nat. Plants)
• Publisher: Springer Nature — Nature Portfolio (United Kingdom, as recorded on this site and in indexing listings)
• ISSN: 2055-026X (print); 2055-0278 (online, confirmed on the journal's own information page)
• First published: 2015 (first issue January 2015)
• Format: Online-only, monthly
• Editorial model: All editorial decisions are made by a team of full-time professional editors, as stated by the journal
• Field: Plant science in the widest sense — fundamental and applied, from molecular biology to ecology, agriculture and societal impact
• Open access: Not a fully open access journal; a DOAJ search by ISSN returned no listing in the research for this profile. Individual articles may be open access by author choice or funder arrangement — check the article and the publisher's current author pages.
• Journal Impact Factor: 15.0 (2025), from the journal's own official metrics page, with a five-year figure of 18.2 (2025)

Why the journal was created

Plant science has an unusual position in modern research. It underpins food security, much of terrestrial ecology and carbon cycling, a large part of biotechnology, and humanity's response to climate change, yet for decades its strongest papers were dispersed among general science journals, botany and plant physiology titles, genetics journals, agronomy journals and ecology journals. The publisher's launch announcement described the new journal as a venue for the very best research into all aspects of plants and their interactions with the wider world, serving researchers interested in better understanding the plant kingdom whether their primary focus was genetics, development, disease resistance, metabolism, agronomy or economics. It also signalled two editorial commitments that still define the title: an interest in translational research that helps create a path to a sustainable future by addressing food security, water and land use efficiency, energy sufficiency and climate change; and an interest in the societal and political impacts of plant research, illustrated in its first issue by discussion of genome editing and the legislation and licensing of genetically modified organisms, alongside research on the origin and evolution of maize in the southwestern United States and a study applying an ecological colour rule to floral pigmentation. In short, the journal was built to do for plant science what the Nature research journals do in other fields — select a small number of papers of exceptional importance and interest to readers well beyond their immediate subfield, and surround them with informed commentary.

Aims and scope in detail

The journal's own short description — the best research on plants, from evolution, development, metabolism and environmental interactions to societal significance — repays unpacking, because each phrase corresponds to a real strand of its contents. Evolution and diversity covers phylogenetics, comparative genomics, domestication and the origins of crops, and the deep history of land plants. Development covers meristems, organ formation, flowering, reproduction and seed biology, often using model systems such as Arabidopsis thaliana. Metabolism and physiology covers photosynthesis, nutrient uptake and use, hormone signalling, secondary metabolites and stress responses. Environmental interactions covers plant–microbe and plant–herbivore interactions, pathogens and immunity, symbiosis including mycorrhizas and nitrogen-fixing associations, responses to drought, heat, flooding and salinity, and plant ecology at community and ecosystem scales. Genetics, genomics and biotechnology runs through all of these: genome sequences and pangenomes, gene editing, synthetic biology and trait engineering. Societal significance is the strand that distinguishes the journal from a purely fundamental title: food security and yield, sustainable agriculture, plant breeding for changing climates, forestry and ecosystem services, bioenergy, conservation, and the economics, policy and public debate around new plant technologies. Papers that connect a molecular or ecological finding to one of those larger stakes — credibly, in the data and not only in the introduction — are characteristic of the journal at its best, as are fundamental papers whose conceptual advance clearly changes how a whole area will work.

Content types and the role of professional editors

Alongside primary research articles, the journal publishes commissioned and submitted front-half and review material. Its launch description lists Comments, Reviews, News & Views, Features and Correspondence from across the full range of disciplines concerned with plants, in addition to original research; its current journal information structure likewise separates research content from reviews, comments and other editorial material, with the exact current list of content types on the publisher's site. Reviews synthesise fast-moving areas for a broad plant readership. News & Views and Comments place new findings, methods and policy questions in context, often written by researchers outside the original study. Correspondence and Features carry debate and longer-form discussion, including about the practice and politics of plant science itself. Editorial decision-making sits with full-time professional editors rather than with practising academics handling papers alongside their own research — a model the journal states explicitly. Professional editors read across the whole field, attend conferences and visit laboratories to stay current, and make the initial importance judgement themselves before sending a minority of submissions for peer review. For authors, the practical consequence is that the covering letter and the abstract carry unusual weight: the first decision is an editor asking whether plant scientists outside the subfield, and ideally scientists outside plant biology, will need to know this result.

Metrics from the journal's own metrics page

Unusually among the journals in this batch, the key figures here come from the publisher's own official metrics page, retrieved for this profile, rather than from an aggregator. Nature Plants reports, for 2025: a Journal Impact Factor of 15.0 and a five-year Journal Impact Factor of 18.2, both from the Journal Citation Reports; an Immediacy Index of 4.2; an Eigenfactor score of 0.03292; an Article Influence Score of 6.209; a Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) of 3.305; and a SCImago Journal Rank of 5.106. The same page gives process and readership figures that are often more useful to an author than the citation averages: a median of 10 days from submission to first editorial decision, a median of 192 days from submission to acceptance, 3,151,746 article downloads in 2025, and 10,496 Altmetric mentions in 2025. The ten-day first-decision median is consistent with the professional-editor model — most manuscripts are decided at the desk, quickly — while the 192-day submission-to-acceptance median, which includes peer review and author revision time for the papers that survive, warns authors that acceptance, when it comes, is rarely fast. The journal's own page also carries a note, shared across Springer Nature journals, that the publisher is a signatory to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment and that citation measures such as the two-year impact factor are not necessarily measures of journal quality, because a small number of highly cited articles can have an outsized influence on them. That caution is worth taking seriously even for a journal whose numbers are strong: an impact factor of 15.0 is an average across a skewed distribution, not a prediction for any single paper.

Secondary sources broadly agree on the journal's standing while differing in detail by year. Aggregator summaries describe it as first-quartile (Q1) in Plant Science, with SCImago-based h-index values in the 148–169 range depending on the snapshot; a direct OpenAlex API read for the source identified by ISSN 2055-0278, retrieved for this profile, gives 3,028 works, 160,070 citations, and summary statistics including an h-index of 204, an i10-index of 1,474 and a two-year mean citedness of about 10.58 — and, tellingly, a first publication year of 1981 for a journal launched in 2015, which shows that OpenAlex source totals aggregate works beyond the journal's own run and are not a clean count of its articles. The previously stored impact factor on this site, 15.0, does match the journal's official 2025 figure exactly, which is not always the case with stored records and is worth noting. Where figures differ between snapshots, the difference is almost always the year or the database, and for formal use the publisher's metrics page or Journal Citation Reports itself should be cited, with the year attached.

Peer review, selectivity and what editors are looking for

The journal does not publish an acceptance rate on the pages consulted for this profile, and no acceptance rate is stated here, because a figure that could not be verified from an official source would be a guess; the same applies to any article processing charge for optional open access, which is not published in this profile for the same reason. What can be said from the journal's stated model and metrics is structural. Desk decisions are made by professional editors at a median of ten days. Peer review, for papers sent out, is by expert referees chosen by those editors, and revision cycles are substantial enough that submission to acceptance has a median of more than six months. The editorial test, consistent with the Nature research journal model, combines technical soundness with importance: is the advance significant, is it of interest to a wide plant science readership and preferably beyond, is the evidence complete for the claim being made, and is the paper placed honestly against prior work, including work in other model systems and in crops? Papers most at risk are technically competent studies whose advance is incremental within a single system, genome or dataset papers without a biological insight that changes interpretation, and translational claims — yield, resilience, field performance — supported only by greenhouse or model-plant evidence. Strengthening a submission usually means adding the experiment or analysis that converts a finding into an advance, and writing the introduction and discussion for the broad reader the editors serve.

Access model and indexing

Nature Plants operates primarily as a subscription journal with open access options for individual articles, rather than as a fully open access title. A search of the DOAJ search API by both of its ISSNs returned no record in the research for this profile, and it should never be described as a DOAJ-listed or fully open access journal. Readers without a subscription will find that some articles are free — through author-funded open access, funder compliance routes, or publisher promotions — and that accepted manuscripts may be available in institutional or funder repositories under the publisher's policies, while other articles require subscription or purchase. Authors subject to funder open access mandates must therefore plan the route to compliance before submission and confirm the current licence and any charge on the publisher's author pages; those operational details change and are not stated here where they could not be verified directly. On discoverability, the journal is covered by the major science citation services appropriate to a Nature Portfolio title — indexing listings report Scopus coverage, which is also the source of the database coverage pattern “2010, 2015-2026” noted above — and its articles are highly visible through the Nature platform itself, as the download and Altmetric figures on its metrics page demonstrate. Authors who need a formal indexing statement for a promotion or funding file should take it from the relevant database's source list rather than from any secondary profile.

Who should submit, and alternatives to weigh

Submit here when a plant science result is a genuine advance that other plant scientists outside your subfield will want to read, and when you can show that advance convincingly in a concise main text with detailed methods and extended data handled to Nature Portfolio conventions. Foundational developmental, genomic, metabolic and ecological findings, and applied work with demonstrated relevance to crops, ecosystems or sustainability, are its heartland. Weigh alternatives honestly. A strong specialist paper may be better served — faster, and in front of its exact community — by a leading field journal in plant physiology, molecular plant biology, plant biotechnology, ecology or agronomy, or by one of the broad life-science journals that review primarily for technical soundness rather than for importance. The decision is not about prestige alone: a paper declined after desk assessment here has lost ten days, which is tolerable, but a paper that enters review and revision here is committing to a median timeline measured in months, and authors with a thesis, grant or priority deadline should weigh that. Early-career researchers should also discuss with supervisors how the possibility of a desk rejection, which is the common outcome at journals edited on an importance test, fits the paper's publication strategy and their own timelines.

Strengths, limitations and cautions

Strengths: a clearly stated, field-wide remit that no older plant journal quite replicates; professional full-time editors; exceptional visibility, with more than three million downloads in 2025 on the publisher's own count; citation performance at the top of plant science, officially 15.0 for the 2025 Journal Impact Factor; a strong commentary and review layer that keeps the field's debates in one place; and a publisher, Springer Nature, with the platform and production infrastructure of the Nature Portfolio. Limitations: very high selectivity on an importance criterion that many sound papers cannot meet; a long median path from submission to acceptance for papers that are reviewed; a subscription-centred access model, with no DOAJ listing, that puts compliance and cost questions on authors who need open access; and format conventions that require authors to compress a complex study into a short main narrative supported by extended data and detailed methods. Cautions for users of this profile: the stored coverage line beginning in 2010 does not mean the journal published in 2010; the stored publisher field is a number, not a name; metric figures must be quoted with their year — 2025 for the official figures used here — because the same journal will carry a different impact factor in the next Journal Citation Reports cycle; and where this profile could not verify a fact from an official source, notably acceptance rate and any open access charge, it says so rather than estimating.

Frequently asked questions

When did Nature Plants start? In 2015. Its first issue appeared in January 2015. Database coverage lines that mention 2010 do not describe the journal's own publishing history.

Is Nature Plants open access? Not as a journal. It is a subscription-centred Nature Portfolio title in which individual articles can be open access. A DOAJ search by ISSN returned no listing in the research for this profile.

What is its impact factor? 15.0 for 2025, with a five-year figure of 18.2, according to the journal's own official metrics page, which also gives SNIP 3.305 and SCImago Journal Rank 5.106 for 2025.

How fast is it? The official metrics page gives a median of 10 days to first editorial decision and 192 days from submission to acceptance, for 2025. The first figure reflects rapid desk decisions on most manuscripts; the second includes review and revision for accepted papers.

Who makes the editorial decisions? A team of full-time professional editors, as the journal states on its information page — not external academic editors handling papers alongside their own research programmes.

What does it publish besides research articles? Reviews, Comments, News & Views, Features and Correspondence, as described in its launch and journal information material, alongside primary research.

Sources and verification. This profile is based on the journal's official journal information page on nature.com (online-only monthly format, professional editors, scope description, abbreviation and electronic ISSN); the journal's official metrics page on nature.com (all 2025 citation, speed and usage figures quoted); the publisher's launch announcement for the journal's 2015 start, positioning and content types; the journal's record on this site (ISSNs, United Kingdom country, coverage pattern and numeric publisher defect, h-index 169 and impact factor 15.0 stored values); a DOAJ search API query by ISSN returning no record; and OpenAlex source data by ISSN for works, citations and h-index. Acceptance rate and open access charge could not be verified from an official source in this research and are deliberately not stated.