Nature Reviews Microbiology

About Nature Reviews Microbiology

Nature Reviews Microbiology: Journal Overview

Nature Reviews Microbiology is a monthly peer-reviewed review journal published by Nature Portfolio (Springer Nature) from London, United Kingdom. Established in 2003, it serves as one of the most authoritative review outlets in the life sciences, covering the full breadth of microbiology — from bacteria, archaea and viruses to fungi and protozoa — and linking fundamental research with its clinical, industrial and environmental applications.

Unlike primary-research journals, Nature Reviews Microbiology publishes only non-primary content: Reviews, Perspectives and Comments. It does not publish original research findings, case studies, meta-analyses or systematic reviews. This focused model has made it the citation leader of its field: the journal's official metrics page reports a Journal Impact Factor of 104.6 (2025), and in the 2024 Journal Citation Reports release it ranked 1st in the "Microbiology" category (source: nature.com/nrmicro/journal-impact, accessed October 2026; en.wikipedia.org citing the 2024 Journal Citation Reports).

Like the other Nature titles, the journal has no external editorial board. All editorial decisions are made by a team of full-time professional editors who are PhD-level scientists, led by Chief Editor Ashley York, DPhil (source: nature.com/nrmicro/editors).

History of Nature Reviews Microbiology

Nature Reviews Microbiology was launched in 2003 as part of the rapid expansion of the Nature Reviews portfolio in the early 2000s — a family of review journals that grew out of the success of the flagship Nature and its early review titles. The journal is now in its 24th volume (2026), publishing twelve monthly issues each year.

The journal's founding reflected a transformation in microbiology itself. As the journal's own aims statement describes, the arrival of new technologies and a growing appreciation of the enormous diversity of microbial life revolutionised the discipline: microbiology began to focus less on individual organisms and more on the processes and mechanisms that link them. Nature Reviews Microbiology was created to embrace this new era, taking an integrated approach that bridges bacteriology, virology, mycology and the biology of archaea and protozoa into a single information resource (source: nature.com/nrmicro/aims, accessed October 2026).

Over more than two decades, the journal has chronicled every major wave in modern microbiology: the rise of microbial genomics and post-genomic biology, the emergence of the human microbiome field, the spread of antimicrobial resistance as a global health priority, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the growing use of phages, engineered microbes and microbial systems in biotechnology and medicine. Its articles are written to remain useful for years, and many of its Reviews and Perspectives have become standard reference points cited hundreds or thousands of times.

Leadership and Editorial Team

The journal's Chief Editor is Ashley York, DPhil, based at Springer Nature in London, UK, who was appointed to the role in 2022 (source: nature.com/nrmicro/editors).

York earned a first-class degree in Biology from University College London before completing a DPhil at the University of Oxford, where his doctoral research at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology — supervised by Ervin Fodor — investigated the molecular mechanisms of influenza virus genome replication. He then moved to the Laboratory of Retrovirology at The Rockefeller University in New York City as a postdoctoral fellow, working with Paul Bieniasz on the intrinsic immune proteins that restrict HIV infection. He entered scientific publishing in 2016, joining Nature Reviews Microbiology as an Associate Editor, and progressed through the roles of Senior Editor and Acting Chief Editor before his appointment as Chief Editor (source: nature.com/nrmicro/editors).

He is supported by Senior Editors including Agustina Taglialegna, PhD and Andrea Du Toit, PhD. Taglialegna studied Microbiology at the National University of Rio Cuarto in Argentina and earned her PhD in Biotechnology researching protein-mediated cell–cell interactions of Staphylococcus aureus biofilms at the Public University of Navarra, Spain. Her postdoctoral work at the Houston Methodist Research Institute in Texas focused on how methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) clinical strains acquire resistance to antibiotics and how this relates to virulence. She joined Nature Microbiology as an Associate Editor in January 2020, became a Senior Editor, and moved to Nature Reviews Microbiology in November 2022. She is based in London.

Du Toit obtained her PhD in molecular and cell biology from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, studying crosstalk between the glucocorticoid receptor and GPCR signalling pathways, with later postdoctoral work on crosstalk between the HIV-1 Vpr protein and the host glucocorticoid receptor in modulating host and viral gene regulation. She has worked in science publishing since 2012, first joining the Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology team before moving to Nature Reviews Microbiology. She is based in Berlin, Germany (source: nature.com/nrmicro/editors).

In keeping with the Nature model, the journal has no external editorial board: decisions are made by this in-house team of full-time, PhD-qualified editors rather than by academic associate editors. General editorial correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at nrmicro@nature.com, and manuscript-status enquiries to the Editorial Assistant at the same address (source: nature.com/nrmicro/about).

Aims & Scope

According to the journal's official journal information page, Nature Reviews Microbiology sets out to be the premier source of reviews and commentaries for the scientific communities it serves. The editors state that they aim to publish articles that are authoritative and accessible, strengthened by clearly understandable figures, tables and other display items, and that they work to maximise the usefulness and impact of every article published. The journal's breadth of coverage is intended to give its articles the widest possible readership (source: nature.com/nrmicro/about, accessed October 2026).

In practice, the scope spans microbiology in its broadest sense, treated as an integrated discipline rather than as separate traditions. The journal publishes high-quality reviews and perspectives on bacteria, archaea, viruses, fungi and protozoa; on how these organisms interact with their environments; on how they are put to use in human endeavour; and on their impact on society. It also carries timely summaries of significant research papers and monthly updates on the latest developments in microbial genomics, post-genomic biology and infectious diseases. Its explicit ambition is to break down the traditional barriers between bacteriology, virology, mycology and the biology of archaea and protozoa, with articles designed to appeal to microbiologists of every persuasion and at every career stage (source: nature.com/nrmicro/aims, paraphrased, accessed October 2026).

The scope encompasses, but is not limited to, the following fields across all microbial groups:

• Biochemistry, physiology and molecular biology
• Genetics and genomics
• Ecology, evolution and biodiversity
• Cellular microbiology
• Environmental microbiology
• Pathogenesis and host defence
• Clinical and diagnostic microbiology
• Infectious diseases
• Antimicrobial therapies and vaccines
• Epidemiology and public health microbiology
• Applied and industrial microbiology
• Microbiology education
• Microbiology and society

The journal also reports that more than 50% of the articles it published in 2025 related to one or more of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and notes that Springer Nature supports the SDGs through a dedicated SDG Programme as a signatory of the SDG Publishers Compact (source: nature.com/nrmicro/about).

Article Types and Content

Nature Reviews Microbiology publishes a defined set of non-primary article types. The flagship formats are:

• Review — accessible, authoritative and balanced overviews of a field or topic, typically peer reviewed.
• Perspective — opinionated discussions of a field or topic, covering historical foundations and influences, emerging research trends and techniques, and ethical, legal and societal issues.
• Consensus Statement — comprehensive analyses and agreed outcomes by a panel of experts on a scientific or medical issue.
• Evidence-Based Guidelines — systematically developed, evidence-based recommendations for standardised research or clinical practice.
• Expert Recommendation — collective opinion pieces by panels of specialists, presenting discussion outcomes and suggesting courses of action, best practices or methodological guidelines.
• Roadmap — forward-looking outlines of the scientific and technical challenges and opportunities in a field, setting direction and the steps required.
• Progress — short review-type articles focused on a recent paper or papers of outstanding interest rather than a full literature survey.
• Technical Review — accessible summaries of techniques, devices or materials and their performance, including comparisons of methods and guidance for data analysis.

In the News and Comment category, the journal publishes News & Views — timely, topical, journalistic commentaries that place a recent publication's key advances in context; Comment articles — agenda-setting, authoritative and often provocative expert pieces calling for action on topical issues in science and its political, ethical and social ramifications; World view pieces — drawing on personal experience or expertise to call for action on improving science or addressing injustice; Viewpoint articles — Q&A discussions among several researchers on a field of interest (these are not peer reviewed); Year in Review articles — highlighting the top three to five papers of the preceding year in specific areas; and Correspondence — comments on papers published in the journal, which may be peer reviewed at the editors' discretion (source: nature.com/nrmicro/for-authors/preparing-your-submission).

The journal's writing guidance asks authors to target readers from advanced undergraduate level upwards in addition to specialists, providing enough background for non-experts in related disciplines to follow the discussion. Authors are expected to be selective and interpretive rather than exhaustive — discussing and interpreting the papers they judge most important rather than listing every publication in the field — and to use standard gene and protein nomenclature, SI units and International Nonproprietary Names for drugs (source: nature.com/nrmicro/for-authors/preparing-your-submission).

Editorial Process and Peer Review

Nature Reviews Microbiology operates a commissioned model. The majority of its articles are invited by the editors, who identify topics and recruit expert authors. Unsolicited proposals are considered, but only for Review-type and Comment-type articles, and they must be submitted through the journal's online submission system as a synopsis: a 200-word abstract, a brief description of the main article sections, a list of key references, and the list of authors with their affiliations (source: nature.com/nrmicro/for-authors/preparing-your-submission).

Crucially, the journal does not publish original research, case studies, meta-analyses or systematic reviews. Non-primary articles may not include previously unpublished research findings and may contain only minimal re-analyses of published data. Authors seeking to publish primary research are directed instead to the sister research journal Nature Microbiology (source: nature.com/nrmicro/for-authors/preparing-your-submission; nature.com/nmicrobiol).

Review-type articles are peer reviewed. The journal's editorial policies require transparency on several fronts: any financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared both within the article text and in the online submission system; authorship must be agreed with the editor at the commissioning stage; and writing assistance must be acknowledged (the journal reserves the right not to consider manuscripts with contributions from medical or science writers). Large language models such as ChatGPT do not satisfy the journal's authorship criteria, and any use of AI tools must be documented in the Methods section or an appropriate part of the manuscript (sources: nature.com/nrmicro/editorial-policies; nature.com/nrmicro/for-authors/preparing-your-submission).

Speed. The journal's official metrics page gives median handling times: 3 days from submission to first editorial decision and 155 days from submission to acceptance (2025 figures) (source: nature.com/nrmicro/journal-impact). Readers should note that the journal does not publicly disclose an acceptance rate, so no reliable figure for selectivity exists in official sources — any number quoted elsewhere is unofficial.

The journal also discloses its use of AI: Nature Reviews titles occasionally use internal Springer Nature-developed AI tools to support the generation of accessory content such as summary points. These are always edited and fact-checked by the author and/or editor to meet Nature Reviews publication standards, and any substantive use of AI beyond accessory content is declared on an individual article basis (source: nature.com/nrmicro/about).

Impact and Metrics

The following metrics are published on the journal's official metrics page (nature.com/nrmicro/journal-impact, accessed October 2026). Year labels are those displayed by the journal. Springer Nature is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), and the journal's metrics page notes that citation measures such as the 2-year Journal Impact Factor are not necessarily measures of journal quality — authors and readers are encouraged to consider a range of metrics.

Historical note: The journal's citation standing has risen substantially over the past decade. In the 2024 Journal Citation Reports release (Clarivate), the journal's Impact Factor was 103.3, ranking it 1st in the "Microbiology" category — the top-ranked microbiology journal of any kind (source: en.wikipedia.org, citing the 2024 Journal Citation Reports). The current 2025 figure of 104.6 keeps it among the highest-cited review journals in all of science. Because metrics are updated annually, readers should always check the current values on the journal's official metrics page before citing them.

The journal's reach is also visible in usage: more than 4.3 million article downloads were recorded in 2025, alongside over 10,700 Altmetric mentions — reflecting both specialist readership and strong public and policy attention to topics such as pandemics, antimicrobial resistance and the microbiome (source: nature.com/nrmicro/journal-impact).

Submission Guidelines

Prospective authors should read the journal's "For Authors" pages before approaching the editors. Key points from the official guidance (source: nature.com/nrmicro/for-authors/preparing-your-submission):

• Commissioned model: Most articles are invited by the editors. Unsolicited proposals are considered only for Review-type and Comment-type articles.
• Proposal format: Proposals are submitted through the online submission system as a synopsis comprising a 200-word abstract, a brief description of the main article sections, a list of key references, and the list of authors and their affiliations.
• Submission portal: Synopses and manuscripts are submitted electronically through the journal's online submission system (mts-nrmicro.nature.com), using the link and instructions provided by the editor.
• What is not considered: The journal does not publish original research, case studies, meta-analyses or systematic reviews.
• Competing interests: All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared both in the article text and via the submission system; they are disclosed to referees and published online and in print.
• Authorship: Should be agreed with the editor at the commissioning stage; the commissioned author is expected to remain the corresponding author unless otherwise agreed. Large language models do not meet authorship criteria.
• Editorial contact: General editorial enquiries go to the Editor at nrmicro@nature.com; manuscript-status enquiries to the Editorial Assistant at the same address.

Publishing Model and Open Access

Nature Reviews Microbiology is a subscription journal. Its official publishing-model page states clearly: articles published in Nature Reviews 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 publication fee (source: nature.com/nrmicro/publishing-model).

Six months after the date of online publication, authors of articles published in the Nature Reviews journals may self-archive the accepted manuscript on their own personal website and/or in their funder or institutional repositories, under the journal's standard licensing terms. Because the journal publishes only non-primary articles — which contain no original, previously unpublished research findings — most funder open-access mandates, which typically apply only to funded primary research, do not require review articles to be published open access (source: nature.com/nrmicro/publishing-model).

Readers should not confuse this with the sister research journal Nature Microbiology, which publishes primary research and does offer a gold open access route with an article processing charge. For Nature Reviews Microbiology itself, there is no APC to quote — publication is free of charge for authors.

The Nature Reviews Portfolio and Sister Journals

Nature Reviews Microbiology is part of the Nature Reviews portfolio, the family of review journals within Nature Portfolio that spans the biomedical and physical sciences. Like its sibling review titles, it is distinguished from the primary-research journals by its exclusive focus on non-primary content and by its professional, full-time editorial team (source: nature.com/nrmicro/about).

Its closest sister journal is Nature Microbiology (launched 2016), which publishes primary research across all areas of microbiology in a hybrid publishing model; authors whose work is not suited to the review format are often directed there. Together, the two journals give Nature Portfolio complementary flagship positions in the field: Nature Reviews Microbiology for authoritative reviews and perspectives, Nature Microbiology for original research. Other related Nature Portfolio titles include Nature Communications and the Communications series, which publish microbiology research among their multidisciplinary content.

Indexing and Abstracting

The journal is indexed and abstracted in the major bibliographic databases for the life sciences, including the Science Citation Index, Current Contents / Life Sciences, BIOSIS Previews, Medline/PubMed, Index Medicus, Scopus, EMBASE, Academic Search Premier, Biotechnology Research Abstracts, CAB Abstracts and the Chemical Abstracts Service (source: en.wikipedia.org).

The correct ISO 4 abbreviation for abstracting and indexing purposes is Nat. Rev. Microbiol. (source: nature.com/nrmicro/about). The journal's CODEN is NRMACK, and its ISSNs are 1740-1526 (print) and 1740-1534 (online).

Key Facts

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Nature Reviews Microbiology?

It is a monthly peer-reviewed review journal published by Nature Portfolio (Springer Nature). It publishes authoritative Reviews, Perspectives and Comments spanning all of microbiology — bacteria, archaea, viruses, fungi and protozoa — bridging fundamental research with clinical, industrial and environmental applications. It does not publish original research.

When was Nature Reviews Microbiology founded?

The journal was launched in 2003, during the early-2000s expansion of the Nature Reviews portfolio. It is now in its 24th volume (2026).

What is the impact factor of Nature Reviews Microbiology?

According to the journal's official metrics page, the Journal Impact Factor is 104.6 (2025), with a 5-year Impact Factor of 113.3 (2025). In the 2024 Journal Citation Reports release, the journal's Impact Factor was 103.3 and it ranked 1st in the "Microbiology" category. Figures are updated annually — check nature.com/nrmicro/journal-impact for current values.

Who is the Chief Editor of Nature Reviews Microbiology?

Ashley York, DPhil, a former influenza-virus and HIV researcher (Oxford; The Rockefeller University) who joined the journal as an Associate Editor in 2016 and became Chief Editor in 2022 (source: nature.com/nrmicro/editors).

Does Nature Reviews Microbiology have an editorial board?

No. Like other Nature titles, it has no external editorial board — all editorial decisions are made by a team of full-time professional editors with PhD-level scientific backgrounds (source: nature.com/nrmicro/about).

Does Nature Reviews Microbiology publish original research?

No. It publishes only non-primary content — Reviews, Perspectives, Comments and related formats. It does not publish original research, case studies, meta-analyses or systematic reviews. Authors with primary research are directed to the sister journal Nature Microbiology.

Can I submit an unsolicited manuscript to Nature Reviews Microbiology?

Most articles are commissioned by the editors, but unsolicited proposals are considered for Review-type and Comment-type articles. Proposals must be 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 the authors with affiliations (source: nature.com/nrmicro/for-authors/preparing-your-submission).

Is Nature Reviews Microbiology open access? Is there an APC?

No. The journal is subscription-only: it does not offer an immediate gold open access option and charges no publication fee. Six months after online publication, authors may self-archive the accepted manuscript on personal websites or in funder/institutional repositories (source: nature.com/nrmicro/publishing-model).

What is the acceptance rate of Nature Reviews Microbiology?

The journal does not publicly disclose an acceptance rate, so no official figure exists. The commissioned model and the median 3-day time to first editorial decision reflect a highly selective process, but any acceptance-rate number found online is unofficial.

How long does peer review take?

The journal's official 2025 speed metrics report a median of 3 days from submission to first editorial decision and 155 days from submission to acceptance (source: nature.com/nrmicro/journal-impact).

How does Nature Reviews Microbiology differ from Nature Microbiology?

Nature Reviews Microbiology is a review journal publishing only Reviews, Perspectives and Comments on a subscription model with no publication fee. Nature Microbiology (launched 2016) is its sister primary-research journal, publishing original research across microbiology with a hybrid (subscription or gold open access) model.

Where do I submit to Nature Reviews Microbiology?

Synopses and manuscripts are submitted electronically through the journal's online submission system (mts-nrmicro.nature.com), using the link and instructions provided by the editor. General editorial enquiries can be sent to nrmicro@nature.com.

What article types does the journal publish?

Review, Perspective, Consensus Statement, Evidence-Based Guidelines, Expert Recommendation, Roadmap, Progress and Technical Review articles, plus News & Views, Comment, World view, Viewpoint, Year in Review and Correspondence pieces.

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