Nature reviews. Rheumatology

About Nature reviews. Rheumatology

Nature Reviews Rheumatology — Journal Profile

Nature Reviews Rheumatology is a monthly review journal in the Nature Portfolio, published by Nature Research under Springer Nature. It does not primarily publish new laboratory or clinical trial data. Its role is synthesis: full-time professional editors commission and develop authoritative reviews, perspectives and commentaries that explain where rheumatology stands, which findings are changing practice, and which questions remain open. For a clinician who cannot follow every primary study in immunology, musculoskeletal medicine and inflammation research, and for a researcher entering a neighbouring subfield, a well-built review in this journal is often the fastest reliable map of the territory.

The journal was established in 2005 as Nature Clinical Practice Rheumatology and took its current title in 2009, when the Nature Clinical Practice titles were brought into the Nature Reviews family. That origin matters because it explains the journal's dual character: it is clinically grounded, written for readers who treat patients as well as for those who study disease mechanisms, yet it is edited to the concise, heavily illustrated and tightly referenced standard that defines the Nature Reviews portfolio across the life and clinical sciences.

Quick facts

Aims and scope

The publisher states that the journal's scope covers the entire spectrum of rheumatology research, and that its articles are written to be accessible to the widest possible audience within and beyond the specialty. In practice that spectrum runs from molecular immunology and genetics through to epidemiology, imaging, rehabilitation and health services. Core disease areas include rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, spondyloarthritis and psoriatic arthritis, gout and other crystal diseases, vasculitis, systemic sclerosis, inflammatory myopathies, Sjogren syndrome, fibromyalgia and chronic pain syndromes, paediatric rheumatic disease, and infection or malignancy where they intersect with rheumatic disease.

Mechanistic coverage is equally broad. Reviews address innate and adaptive immunity, cytokine and signalling pathways, synovial biology, cartilage and bone metabolism, the microbiome in inflammatory disease, neuroimmune interaction in pain, and the genetics and epigenetics of autoimmune conditions. Clinical coverage follows the same arc from mechanism to bedside: early diagnosis, imaging and biomarker strategies, treat-to-target approaches, biologic and targeted synthetic drugs, safety monitoring, comorbidities such as cardiovascular disease in inflammatory arthritis, pregnancy in rheumatic disease, and the organisation of multidisciplinary care. A reader should therefore expect a single monthly issue to move deliberately between a signalling pathway, a trial landscape and a practical management question, because that movement is the journal's stated purpose.

What the journal publishes

The central format is the commissioned Review: a substantial, peer-reviewed synthesis by invited experts, structured around a field's current state, points of controversy and likely directions. Primer-style articles, where they appear in the wider Nature Reviews disease portfolio tradition, aim to give a complete orientation to a condition for non-specialist readers. Perspective and Comment pieces are shorter and more argumentative, setting out a position, a policy concern or a research priority. News and Views style content places a new primary finding in context for readers outside its immediate subfield. Research highlights and editorial material complete an issue, drawing attention to notable work published elsewhere.

This mix explains why citation and authorship patterns differ from a primary research journal. Articles are usually written by internationally recognised basic and clinical researchers, often in multi-author teams that pair laboratory and clinical expertise. The publisher notes that content is targeted at readers in the biological and medical sciences from postgraduate level upward, and that while practising doctors, researchers and academics within the specialty are the core audience, the writing aims to remain accessible to readers in any biological or medical discipline. Good articles here therefore define their terms, use figures to carry mechanistic load, and avoid assuming that a geneticist and a practising rheumatologist bring the same background to the page.

Editorial model

All editorial decisions are made by a team of full-time professional editors, a defining feature of the Nature Reviews model. The journal receives advice and support from an external advisory board of internationally renowned rheumatologists, but day-to-day commissioning, development and decision-making sit with the in-house team. General editorial correspondence is directed to the Editor through the journal's official contact address published on its Nature page. Authors who hope to write for the journal should understand the implication of this model before drafting anything: much of the content is planned and commissioned, proposals are judged against an editorial programme rather than in isolation, and a topic that duplicates a recent or forthcoming review is unlikely to be taken forward however strong the proposing team may be.

Peer review still applies to commissioned scholarly content. Invitation is not acceptance. Manuscripts are assessed for accuracy, balance, currency and clarity, edited for structure and accessibility, and checked against the journal's formatting and reference conventions. Because reviews in this journal are frequently used in teaching and in guideline-adjacent reading, balance matters intensely: a review that argues a contested position must still represent the evidence that cuts against it, distinguish established findings from early signals, and separate licensed, guideline-supported practice from experimental approaches.

Metrics and standing

The publisher's own journal metrics page for this title reports a Journal Impact Factor of 33.7 for 2025, a five-year Journal Impact Factor of 40.7 for 2025, an Immediacy Index of 5.3, an Eigenfactor Score of 0.02111, an Article Influence Score of 11.514, a Source Normalized Impact per Paper value of 6.130 for 2025 and a SCImago Journal Rank of 6.768 for 2025. The same publisher page reported 1,467,234 downloads and 3,460 Altmetric mentions for 2025. Those figures are year-stamped here deliberately: journal metrics move annually, and any use of them in an institutional evaluation should cite the year and the source rather than repeating a number without context.

The JournalsWorld record for this post lists an h-index of 214 and an SJR of 6.768 with a Q1 standing, consistent with the publisher-reported 2025 SJR and with SCImago's placement of the title near the top of the rheumatology category, second only to the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases in the consulted SCImago category table. Q1 means the journal sits in the top quarter of its category under that ranking system; it does not mean every article in it is equally influential, and it should never substitute for reading the specific review you intend to rely on. Older secondary sources quote lower historical impact factors, including a 2021 figure, and those numbers are not errors so much as snapshots from earlier years — another reason to date every metric you quote.

Indexing and discoverability

The title is a long-established MEDLINE and PubMed-listed journal, is covered by Scopus (source record under the title Nature reviews. Rheumatology, with the same ISSN pair), and is included in the Science Citation Index Expanded ecosystem that underlies the Journal Citation Reports. Its ISO 4 abbreviation, Nat. Rev. Rheumatol., is the form to use in reference lists that require abbreviated journal titles, and its articles carry DOIs in the Nature publishing system, with the article prefix pattern used across the Nature Portfolio. For literature searching, combining the journal title with a disease name and a concept term is usually more productive than browsing by issue, because the archive now spans two decades of reviews whose relevance is topical rather than chronological.

Who reads it, and how to use it well

Practising rheumatologists use the journal to stay current outside their immediate subspecialty and to find balanced accounts of fast-moving treatment areas. Immunologists and translational researchers use it to see how mechanistic findings are being interpreted clinically. Trainees use it as structured reading: a single review can supply the framework for a teaching session, a journal club or the background section of a thesis, provided it is then supplemented with the primary studies and current guidelines it summarises. Guideline writers and systematic reviewers treat it as a secondary source — valuable for framing questions and finding primary literature, never as a substitute for appraising that literature directly.

Three habits improve the value readers get from it. First, check the publication date and the search or acceptance context of a review before applying it, because treatment landscapes in areas such as lupus or inflammatory arthritis can shift within a few years. Second, follow the references outward: the review is a map, and examination questions, grant proposals and clinical decisions should rest on the primary sources the map points to. Third, notice the article type. A Comment is an argument, a Review is a synthesis, and a news-style piece is a pointer; treating them as interchangeable weakens any argument built on them.

Guidance for prospective authors

Begin with the journal's official information for authors on its Nature page, not with third-party submission guides, several of which invent fees or timelines for this title. Expect the realistic route in to be a proposal or an editorial conversation rather than a cold submission of a finished review, and expect the editors to test three things: whether the topic is timely and not already covered, whether the proposed team has the standing and breadth to write authoritatively, and whether the planned article will serve readers beyond one subfield. Where the publisher has not stated a figure on its official pages for a particular charge or timetable, that detail should be regarded as not publicly disclosed and confirmed directly with the editorial office rather than taken from an aggregator site. Subscription journals in the Nature Portfolio also operate specific open access arrangements for some article types and funders; the controlling information is always the current article page and the publisher's current author guidance.

Country and publisher note

Sources differ in how they label this publisher's country. The JournalsWorld record and several ranking listings place Nature Research in the United Kingdom, reflecting Springer Nature's London base and the Nature Portfolio's historic home, while some Scopus-derived listings record the United States, reflecting corporate and source-record conventions for Nature Research. This profile follows the JournalsWorld record (United Kingdom) for the directory field and flags the variation here so that readers comparing catalogues understand why they may see a different country in another database. The ISSN pair and publisher identity are consistent across all consulted sources; only the country label varies.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs? Print ISSN 1759-4790 and online ISSN 1759-4804, as stated on the publisher's journal information page.

Is it a primary research journal? No. It is a review journal. Its influence comes from synthesis, commissioning and editorial selection rather than from publishing original trial or laboratory data.

What was its earlier title? Nature Clinical Practice Rheumatology, from its 2005 launch until the 2009 move to the current title.

How often does it appear? Monthly.

Who edits it? A team of full-time professional editors, advised by an external advisory board of rheumatologists. Sarah Onuora is the editor-in-chief named in the consulted publisher and reference sources.

Can I submit a review uninvited? Treat the journal as primarily commissioned. Consult the official author guidance and be prepared to propose rather than simply submit, and confirm current arrangements with the editorial office.

Landmark themes in the archive

Certain themes recur across the archive because they define modern rheumatology itself. The cytokine era, in which blocking a single inflammatory mediator transformed outcomes in rheumatoid arthritis and spondyloarthritis, is documented review by review as new targets and biosimilar medicines entered practice. Osteoarthritis, long treated as simple wear, is reframed across multiple reviews as a whole-joint disease involving cartilage, bone, synovium, pain pathways and metabolic factors — a reframing that changed how trials are designed. Lupus coverage follows a disease moving from broad immunosuppression toward interferon, B-cell and other targeted strategies, with repeated attention to trial endpoints and to the heterogeneity that makes lupus research difficult. Gout reviews track a parallel shift from neglected condition to a field with clear treat-to-target serum urate goals and a growing interest in cardiovascular and renal comorbidity. Reading these threads together gives a trainee something a single textbook chapter cannot: a dated record of how expert consensus actually formed, contested and revised itself.

How the journal sits among rheumatology titles

Rheumatology readers choose between several kinds of venue, and this journal's position becomes clear by contrast. Society and primary research journals such as the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases publish original studies and are the first home of new trial data. The Lancet Rheumatology combines original research, reviews and commentary under a general medical publisher's clinical brand. Broad review titles in the same Nature family cover immunology, nephrology, endocrinology and other neighbouring systems, and a rheumatology question often crosses into them. Nature Reviews Rheumatology is the specialist synthesis layer for the field: narrower than a general medical journal, deeper than a news service, and designed so that a reader can enter an unfamiliar disease area through one curated article and leave with a reliable structure for further reading. Libraries value it for teaching collections for exactly that reason, and clinicians value it because its articles are written to be finished, not merely skimmed, in the time a busy clinic allows.

Reading reviews responsibly in clinical work

A review, however authoritative, is a secondary source with an editorial point of view and a closing date. Drug safety information, licensed indications and guideline recommendations may all have moved since publication, and a responsible reader checks current guidelines from bodies such as EULAR and the American College of Rheumatology, current product information, and the primary trials before changing care. Where a review discusses an experimental therapy, note its development stage and whether later trials confirmed early promise; rheumatology has instructive examples in both directions. Where a review makes a strong recommendation, trace the evidence it cites for that specific claim rather than assuming the whole reference list supports every sentence equally. These habits do not diminish the journal — they are precisely the use its editors design for, placing expert synthesis in the service of better primary reading rather than as a replacement for it.

For librarians and literature searchers

Cataloguers should record the title change explicitly: holdings under Nature Clinical Practice Rheumatology for 2005 to 2009 continue under Nature Reviews Rheumatology from 2009, with the ISSN pair given in the quick facts table applying to the current title. Searchers building a systematic strategy should include both titles when a question spans the change, and should use the abbreviated title form in databases that index by abbreviation. Because reviews are heavily referenced in later reviews, citation chasing from a well-chosen article in this journal is an efficient supplementary search method, provided the searcher then screens the primary studies found rather than citing the review in their place. Interlibrary and document supply requests should quote the article DOI where one is given, since Nature Portfolio article pages, PubMed records and library link resolvers all key reliably on that identifier.

Finally, readers comparing subscription and open routes should check each article individually. Access status can differ between a commissioned review, a comment piece and promotional or sponsored content attached to the same issue, and the article page, rather than the journal home page, is the authoritative place to confirm what may be read, downloaded, reused in teaching, or shared under the terms that apply to that specific item and its stated licence conditions.

Verification note

This profile was built from the JournalsWorld stored record for post 388348 (ISSN 1759-4790 and 1759-4804; Nature Research; United Kingdom; h-index 214; SJR 6.768; Q1) checked against the publisher's journal information and metrics pages on nature.com and against SCImago category data. A duplicate candidate involving this record is flagged separately in the worker report: another JournalsWorld post carries the same title and the same ISSN pair. No merge has been performed as part of this profile.