Nature Reviews Drug Discovery

About Nature Reviews Drug Discovery

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery: Journal Overview

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery is a monthly peer-reviewed review journal published by Nature Portfolio (Springer Nature), headquartered in London, United Kingdom. Established in 2002, it is devoted entirely to the science, strategy, and business of drug discovery and development — from target discovery and medicinal chemistry through clinical trials, drug regulation, and industry economics. It is consistently the highest-cited journal in its fields: according to the journal's official metrics page, its Journal Impact Factor stands at 91.2 (2025), with a 5-year Journal Impact Factor of 131.3 (2025) — figures that place it among the most influential review journals in all of science (source: nature.com/nrd/journal-impact, accessed October 2026).

The journal does not publish original research. Instead, it publishes commissioned authoritative reviews and perspectives, analytical pieces built on existing datasets, news and analysis of the pharmaceutical industry, and commentary on patent law, regulation, and market strategy. This dual identity — a scientific review journal that also functions as an industry intelligence source — is what sets it apart: medicinal chemists read it for mechanistic insight, while pharmaceutical executives read it for analysis of pipelines, approvals, and partnering trends.

Like the other Nature titles, the journal operates without an external editorial board. All editorial decisions are made by a team of full-time professional editors who hold PhDs and are working scientists turned publishing professionals, based principally in London and the United States (source: nature.com/nrd/about; nature.com/nrd/editors).

History of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery was launched in 2002 as one of the expanding family of Nature Reviews journals that grew out of Nature Publishing Group's review portfolio around the turn of the millennium. Its first volume appeared in 2002 — early articles included pieces on development cycles, the analysis of drug value, and the landmark concept of "the druggable genome" (sources: nature.com articles from volume 1, 2002).

From the outset, the journal combined scientific reviews with industry-facing analysis. Its stated goal was not only to provide authoritative overviews of the science underpinning drug discovery and development, but also to present data and analysis on strategic and business issues — the evolution of therapeutic-area marketplaces, partnering trends, and key events in patent law (source: nature.com/nrd 10th-anniversary editorial, 2012).

In January 2012 the journal marked its tenth anniversary with an editorial, "A decade in drug discovery," which gathered ten highly cited and heavily downloaded articles — one from each year of the previous decade — into a freely accessible collection. The editorial noted that an analysis of the industry's challenges written near the start of the journal's life could have resonated with readers at any point during that decade — a reflection of how durable the field's core questions (attrition rates, soaring R&D costs, the patent cliff) have remained (source: nature.com/articles/nrd3648).

By its twentieth year (2022), the journal had become the undisputed leader of its categories. Its 2021 Journal Impact Factor of 112.288, as recorded in the Journal Citation Reports 2021 release (cited via the journal's secondary bibliographic references; official journal figures are listed in the metrics section below), ranked it 1st out of 158 journals in "Biotechnology & Applied Microbiology" and 1st out of 279 journals in "Pharmacology & Pharmacy" The journal now routinely publishes landmark analyses — such as the annual series on novel drug targets licensed by regulators, and milestone reviews like "Kinase drug discovery 20 years after imatinib" (2022) — that define the field's agenda.

Leadership and Editorial Team

The current Chief Editor of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery is Dr. Peter Kirkpatrick, a chemist by training. He earned his BA at the University of Cambridge, UK, specialising in chemistry, and stayed in Cambridge for his PhD, investigating the biosynthesis and mode of action of vancomycin-group antibiotics in the group of Dudley Williams. After postdoctoral research in the same group, he joined the launch team of Nature Reviews in 2000, joined the launch team of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery as Associate Editor in 2001, and became Chief Editor in 2004. He is a member of the Board of Trustees for the charity Antibiotic Research UK, and is based in London, UK (source: nature.com/nrd/editors).

The in-house professional editorial team (sources: nature.com/nrd/editors, journal credits):

• Chief Editor: Peter Kirkpatrick, PhD — London, UK
• Senior Editor: Sarah Crunkhorn, PhD — USA. BSc in pharmacology from the University of Sheffield; doctoral research in molecular toxicology at the University of Surrey in collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline; postdoctoral work at the Joslin Diabetes Centre, Harvard Medical School. Joined the journal as an Associate Editor in May 2007.
• Senior Editor: Alex Eccleston, PhD — London, UK. BSc in molecular biology and biochemistry from the University of Durham; PhD at the ICRF (now Cancer Research UK); postdoctoral research on RAS signalling pathways at Onyx Pharmaceuticals, California; previously a Senior Editor at Nature for nearly 20 years. Started at the journal in 2022.
• Senior Editor: M. Teresa Villanueva, PhD — London, UK. Degree in Pharmacy from the University of Granada, Spain; PhD at the Vall d'Hebrón Institute of Oncology in Barcelona studying the metalloproteinase TACE in breast cancer; postdoctoral fellow at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, on WNT signalling in breast and ovarian cancer. Joined the Nature Reviews department in 2010 and this journal as Senior Editor in March 2017.
• Senior Editor (News): Katie Kingwell, MA — London, UK. BA in physiological sciences from the University of Oxford; postgraduate research in pharmacology at Cambridge. Joined Nature Reviews in 2008, worked on Nature Reviews Neurology, and took up her current news role in 2014.

As with other Nature titles, there is no external editorial board: all commissioning and acceptance decisions rest with these full-time professional editors. Production, sub-editing, art, and managing-editor staff support the journal (Journal Credits page), and the journal can also draw on the Reviews Cross-Journal Editorial Team — established in 2016 and headed by Dr. Katharine Wrighton — which handles content across the Nature Reviews portfolio (source: nature.com/nrd/reviews-cross-journal-editorial-team).

Aims & Scope

According to the journal's official journal information page, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery is a monthly journal aimed at everyone working in the drug discovery and development arena. Each issue carries top-quality reviews and perspectives spanning the full breadth of the field, plus news stories investigating the hottest topics in drug discovery, timely summaries of key primary research papers, and concise updates on fast-moving areas such as new drug approvals, patent law, and emerging industry trends and strategies (source: nature.com/nrd/about).

In practice, the journal's coverage falls into three interlocking streams:

1. Science reviews: authoritative, commissioned reviews on targets and pathways, therapeutic modalities (small molecules, biologics, cell and gene therapies, vaccines), medicinal and computational chemistry, drug delivery, toxicology, and the 'omic technologies reshaping discovery.
2. Strategy and policy analysis: data-driven analyses of R&D productivity, clinical-trial success rates, regulatory decisions, pricing and pharmacoeconomics, intellectual property, and partnering and market trends — content aimed as much at industry executives and policymakers as at bench scientists.
3. News and intelligence: reporting on new drug approvals, pipeline milestones, emerging companies, and regulatory shifts, including regular front-section features such as Patent Watch, From the Analyst's Couch, Fresh from the Pipeline, and News and Analysis (source: nature.com/nrd issue archives).

The journal is part of the Nature Reviews portfolio of journals within Nature Portfolio; a summary of the editorial input and checks applied to its content is published on its site (source: nature.com/nrd/about).

Article Types and Content

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery publishes only non-primary content — no original research findings. The main article types include:

• Reviews: invited, comprehensive, peer-reviewed overviews of a field or topic, commissioned from leading specialists. They are supplemented with glossary explanations for non-specialist readers and illustrated with figures redrawn by Nature's in-house art editors.
• Perspectives: forward-looking or opinion-driven pieces in which authors may express personal viewpoints, provided they distinguish clearly between generally accepted views and their own perspectives.
• Analysis articles: quantitative, data-driven studies built on existing datasets — for example analyses of clinical-trial success rates, drug-target landscapes, or approval trends.
• Progress articles: focused pieces on outstanding or fast-moving issues in the field.
• News & Comment: editorials, news stories, "From the Analyst's Couch" data features, "Patent Watch" updates on intellectual property, "Fresh from the Pipeline" profiles of newly approved drugs, "An Audience With" interviews with industry leaders, obituaries, and research highlights summarising notable primary papers.

Proposals are accepted only for Review-type and Comment-type articles; the journal does not publish original research, case studies, meta-analyses, or systematic reviews (source: nature.com/nrd/for-authors/preparing-your-submission).

Editorial Process and Peer Review

Most articles are invited or commissioned by the in-house editors, though authors may submit proposals for Review-type and Comment-type articles. The journal states that it actively works toward diverse representation within its author pool — across gender, race/ethnicity, geography, and career stage — and encourages corresponding authors to keep diversity in mind when proposing co-authors (source: nature.com/nrd/for-authors/editorial-process).

How a commissioned article moves to publication:

1. Proposal and commissioning. Proposals are submitted through the journal's online submission system as a synopsis: a 200-word abstract, a description of the main article sections, key references, and author affiliations. Editors decide whether to formally commission the piece.
2. Submission. Before submission, the article must not be under consideration by another journal.
3. Initial editorial assessment. The handling editor evaluates the organisation, structure, and accessibility of the manuscript and may recommend changes before formal peer review.
4. Peer review. Review-type articles undergo rigorous external peer review by several experts in the field. Reviews are expected to present an unbiased overview with fair discussion of alternative viewpoints. The editor returns referee reports with guidance, requires a formal rebuttal when revisions are requested, and accepts the article in principle once revisions are judged adequate. Anonymised referee reports are circulated to the referees.
5. Detailed editing. All articles and display items are edited in-house for structure, flow, clarity, language, and scientific correctness; all suggested changes require author approval before formal acceptance.
6. Artwork. All figures are developed and redrawn by the in-house art editors after peer review.
7. Copy editing and proofs. Articles are copy edited for spelling, grammar, house style, nomenclature, and consistency; authors review proofs, with only essential changes permitted at that stage.

Speed. The journal publishes its own turnaround metrics: the median time from submission to first editorial decision is 27 days, and the median time from submission to acceptance is 293 days (source: nature.com/nrd/journal-impact, 2025 figures).

Impact and Metrics

The following metrics are published on the journal's official metrics page (nature.com/nrd/journal-impact, accessed October 2026). Years refer to the metric year as displayed by the journal.

Historical note: the journal's Impact Factor has been volatile in recent years, reflecting the broader COVID-era citation dynamics that affected many top journals. It peaked above 110 (2021 Journal Citation Reports, 112.288) and has since settled to 91.2 in the 2025 display year. Notably, the 5-year Impact Factor (131.3) remains well above the 2-year figure, indicating that the journal's articles accumulate citations over a long tail — typical for authoritative reviews. Readers should always check the current figures on the official metrics page, which is updated annually.

Springer Nature is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), and the metrics page cautions that citation measures like the 2-year Journal Impact Factor are not necessarily measures of journal quality — authors and readers are encouraged to consider a range of metrics (source: nature.com/nrd/journal-impact).

Submission Guidelines

The journal's "For Authors" pages provide detailed guidance, and the editors recommend reading them before approaching the journal. Key points (sources: nature.com/nrd/for-authors; /nrd/for-authors/preparing-your-submission):

• Commissioning model: articles are invited or commissioned by the in-house editors; unsolicited full manuscripts of review type are not the norm. Authors may submit proposals for Review-type and Comment-type articles.
• Proposal format: a synopsis comprising a 200-word abstract, a brief description of the main article sections, a list of key references, and the authors with their affiliations, submitted through the online submission system.
• Exclusivity: the article must not have been submitted to, and must not be under consideration by, another journal.
• Not published: original research, case studies, meta-analyses, and systematic reviews.
• Nomenclature: for drugs, International Nonproprietary Names (INNs) should be used as the default.
• Contact: general editorial inquiries and manuscript-status inquiries are addressed to the editorial office at nrdd@nature.com (source: nature.com/nrd/about).
• Peer review: review-type articles are externally peer reviewed by several experts; Perspectives authors are expected to distinguish personal opinions from accepted views.
• Diversity: the Nature Portfolio journals aim for diverse representation among commissioned authors.

Publishing Model and Open Access

Articles in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery — like all Nature Reviews journals — can only be published via the subscription route. The journal does not offer an immediate gold open access option, and it does not charge authors any fee for publication (source: nature.com/nrd/publishing-model).

The rationale given is that the journal publishes only non-primary articles (Reviews, News & Views, Comment), which contain no original unpublished research findings; most funder open-access mandates apply only to primary research, so review authors generally do not need to take action to comply.

Six months after the date of online publication, authors may self-archive the accepted manuscript on their own personal website and/or in their funder or institutional repositories. By agreeing to write for a Nature Reviews journal, authors accept the standard licensing terms, which supersede any conflicting terms asserted by the author or third parties (source: nature.com/nrd/publishing-model; /nrd/editorial-policies).

Landmark and Influential Articles

Over more than two decades, the journal has published reviews and analyses that became defining references for the field. Examples documented on nature.com include:

• "The druggable genome" (Hopkins & Groom, 2002) — an early, agenda-setting analysis estimating the size of the druggable genome, published in the journal's first year.
• "Trends in development cycles" (Bolten & DeGregorio, 2002) — quantifying the cost, length, and risk of the drug development process, from the inaugural volume.
• "A decade in drug discovery" (2012) — the tenth-anniversary editorial gathering ten highly cited and downloaded articles, one per year from 2002–2011, into a freely accessible collection (source: nature.com/articles/nrd3648).
• "Kinase drug discovery 20 years after imatinib" (Cohen, Cross & Jänne, 2022) — a milestone review of two decades of kinase-targeted therapy.
• "Novel drug targets" annual series — the ongoing yearly analysis (with the NIH Illuminating the Druggable Genome programme) of novel mechanism-of-action targets among newly licensed drugs; the 2021 edition reported 59 novel drugs licensed across the US, EU, and Japan, with 14 novel MoA targets (source: nature.com/articles/d41573-022-00057-7).

Regular front-section features — From the Analyst's Couch, Patent Watch, Fresh from the Pipeline, An Audience With — produce the industry-trend data that makes the journal a standard reference in pharmaceutical strategy discussions as well as in science.

The Nature Reviews Family

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery sits within the Nature Reviews portfolio of journals in Nature Portfolio, alongside sister titles covering the rest of the life, physical, clinical, and social sciences. Because these titles publish only commissioned, non-primary content handled by professional in-house editors, the portfolio is editorially distinct from the Nature-branded research journals; a Reviews Cross-Journal Editorial Team (established 2016) supports the portfolio as needed (sources: nature.com/nrd/about; nature.com/nrd/reviews-cross-journal-editorial-team).

This model explains the journal's unusual influence: it combines the reach and citation prestige of the Nature brand with a deliberately practitioner-focused mission — written for, and read by, the people who actually discover, develop, regulate, and invest in new medicines.

Key Facts

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Nature Reviews Drug Discovery?

It is a monthly peer-reviewed review journal published by Nature Portfolio (Springer Nature), launched in 2002. It covers the entire drug discovery and development arena — scientific reviews of targets, modalities, and methods, plus news, analysis, and commentary on industry trends, regulation, and strategy (source: nature.com/nrd/about).

What is the impact factor of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery?

According to the journal's official metrics page, the Journal Impact Factor is 91.2 (2025), with a 5-year Impact Factor of 131.3 (2025). These figures are updated annually — verify current values at nature.com/nrd/journal-impact.

Who is the Editor-in-Chief of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery?

The journal's chief editor is Dr. Peter Kirkpatrick, a Cambridge-trained chemist who joined the journal's launch team as Associate Editor in 2001 and became Chief Editor in 2004 (source: nature.com/nrd/editors).

Does Nature Reviews Drug Discovery have an editorial board?

No. Like the other Nature titles, it has no external editorial board — all editorial decisions are made by a team of full-time professional editors with PhDs in relevant scientific fields (source: nature.com/nrd/about).

Can I submit an unsolicited manuscript to Nature Reviews Drug Discovery?

Not as a full manuscript — articles are invited or commissioned by the editors. However, authors may submit proposals (a 200-word abstract, main section outline, key references, and author list) for Review-type and Comment-type articles through the online submission system (source: nature.com/nrd/for-authors/preparing-your-submission).

Does the journal publish original research?

No. It publishes only non-primary content: Reviews, Perspectives, Analysis articles, Progress articles, and News & Comment. It does not publish original research, case studies, meta-analyses, or systematic reviews (source: nature.com/nrd/publishing-model).

How are articles peer reviewed?

Review-type articles undergo rigorous external peer review by several experts in the field. Authors must provide a formal rebuttal when revisions are requested; anonymised referee reports are circulated to the referees. All figures are redrawn by the in-house art editors after peer review (source: nature.com/nrd/for-authors/editorial-process).

Is Nature Reviews Drug Discovery open access? What does it cost to publish?

It is subscription-only: there is no immediate gold open access option, and the journal charges no fee for publication. Authors may self-archive the accepted manuscript six months after online publication (source: nature.com/nrd/publishing-model).

How long does the editorial process take?

The median time from submission to first editorial decision is 27 days, and the median time from submission to acceptance is 293 days (source: nature.com/nrd/journal-impact, 2025 figures).

What are the journal's ISSNs and official abbreviation?

Print ISSN 1474-1776, online ISSN 1474-1784. The correct abbreviation for indexing is Nat. Rev. Drug Discov. (source: nature.com/nrd/about).

What topics does the journal cover?

The full drug discovery and development pipeline — target discovery and validation, medicinal and computational chemistry, therapeutic modalities, drug delivery, toxicology, clinical trials, drug regulation, intellectual property, pharmacoeconomics, and industry strategy — alongside news and analysis of approvals, pipelines, and market trends (source: nature.com/nrd/about).

How can I contact the journal's editors?

General editorial inquiries and manuscript-status questions should be addressed to the editorial office at nrdd@nature.com (source: nature.com/nrd/about).

Profile compiled October 2026 from official Nature Portfolio and Springer Nature sources listed below. Metrics and policies change over time — always verify current figures on the journal's official pages before citing or acting on them.