Nutrients

About Nutrients

Nutrients — A Researched Profile of the MDPI Nutrition Journal

Nutrients (ISSN 2072-6643) is an international, peer-reviewed, fully open-access journal of human nutrition published by MDPI in Switzerland. Launched in 2009, it has grown into one of the largest and most visible titles in nutrition science: the saved Journals World record carries an h-index of 279, an impact factor of 5.8 and a Q1 designation, and OpenAlex records tens of thousands of works under this ISSN. The journal describes itself as an advanced forum for publishing studies related to human nutrition, publishing reviews, regular research papers and short communications, and it is explicit about the kind of paper it wants — manuscripts that provide novel insights into the impacts of nutrition on human health, or novel methods for assessing nutritional status, including animal studies whose outcomes have relevance to human health. That human-health relevance test is the single most important fit criterion for prospective authors, and this profile returns to it repeatedly.

Quick Facts

Identity, Publisher and History

MDPI, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, is the publisher of record, as stated across MDPI's own journal pages and on the journal's published articles, which carry the line 'Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland'. The numeric publisher code stored in the older Journals World record is an internal artifact; the name used here is the one given by MDPI itself and by the verified OpenAlex source record, which lists the host organisation as Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute. The journal began in 2009, in the first wave of large open-access specialty titles, and the saved record's coverage line of 2009 to the present matches both the publisher's launch-year table and the OpenAlex record, whose first production year is also 2009.

The journal's trajectory since then is a study in scale. MDPI's own journal-cluster table for food, nutrition and health science lists Nutrients with a launch year of 2009, an impact factor of 5.8, a CiteScore of 10.2, a median time to first decision of fifteen days and a median of 2.4 days from acceptance to publication. OpenAlex, counting the full backfile, records close to forty thousand works — a volume that reflects both the semimonthly schedule and the journal's extensive use of guest-edited special issues, in which much of its content is organised. That scale is central to understanding the journal: it is simultaneously a high-visibility Q1 outlet in nutrition and dietetics and a very high-throughput operation, and both halves of that description shape the author experience.

Aims and Scope in Detail

MDPI's aims and scope page defines the journal as an international, peer-reviewed open-access advanced forum for studies related to human nutrition. It publishes reviews, regular research papers and short communications, aims to encourage scientists to publish their results in as much detail as possible, and requires that full experimental details be provided so results can be reproduced; electronic files, software and other material unsuitable for the manuscript itself can be deposited as supplementary material. The decisive sentence for authors is the relevance test: the journal will consider manuscripts that provide novel insights into the impacts of nutrition on human health or novel methods for assessing nutritional status, including animal studies with relevance to human health. A technically excellent study of nutrient chemistry with no articulated health relevance is therefore a risky submission, while a modest study with a clear health question, a defensible design and an honest account of its limitations sits squarely in scope.

The subject areas MDPI lists give the scope its detailed shape: macronutrients; micronutrients; essential nutrients; bioactive nutrients; nutrient requirements; nutrient sources; human nutrition aspects; functional foods; nutraceuticals; health claims; public health; diet-related disorders; metabolic syndrome; malnutrition; nutritional supplements; sport nutrition; nutritional status and body composition; bariatric surgery; sarcopenia; nutritional physiology; and nutrigenomics. The journal further organises content into sections, including a Nutrition and Public Health section whose own description welcomes multidisciplinary work on diet-related public-health problems — community-based interventions, participatory research, public policy, health disparities, food safety, fortification, food supply and sustainability, nutrition assistance programmes, hunger and food security, and the evaluation and translation of interventions. Authors should identify the section their paper belongs to before submitting; in a journal of this size, correct section placement is part of how a manuscript reaches editors and reviewers who work in its subfield.

Article Types and the Special-Issue System

The core article types are reviews, regular research papers and short communications. In practice, a large share of the journal's content appears in special issues — guest-edited collections on defined themes, each with its own call, deadline and editorial team drawn from the field. MDPI presents special issues as offering ease of navigation, greater discoverability and research-network expansion, and notes that articles in special issues are promoted through the journal's channels. For authors, the system has real advantages — a thematic home, an editor actively building a collection, and the fast timelines the publisher advertises — and real obligations: check that the guest editor and the theme are genuinely in your area, that the deadline is workable, and that your paper answers the collection's question rather than merely containing one of its keywords. Papers submitted to a special issue are, per MDPI's standard wording on its calls, thoroughly refereed through the journal's peer-review process, and manuscripts may be submitted until the stated deadline once the author has registered on the MDPI site.

Peer Review, Speed and Charges

MDPI describes its review model on the journal's pages as single-anonymized peer review: reviewers know the authors' identities, authors do not know the reviewers'. The publisher-reported service figures are fast by the standards of nutrition publishing — a median of fifteen days to first decision and 2.4 days from acceptance to publication in MDPI's cluster table — and accepted papers are published continuously, appearing online as soon as they are ready rather than waiting for a complete issue, then being listed together on the relevant special-issue or section pages. Speed at this level is the journal's main attraction for authors working to grant, tenure or clinical-trial reporting deadlines, and it is also the aspect of the journal most discussed critically in the literature; authors should satisfy themselves, as with any very fast journal, that the review their own paper receives is substantive, and should engage with reviewer comments in full rather than treating the timeline as a formality.

All articles are published in full open access under a CC BY licence — the licence statement printed on the journal's articles and journal pages — and the article processing charge is CHF 2,900, the figure given in MDPI's journal-cluster table and its article-processing-charge information. The charge covers peer review, copyediting, typesetting, long-term archiving and journal management, in MDPI's own description. There is no subscription route and no print edition to consider; budgeting means confirming, before submission, whether a grant, institution or MDPI membership arrangement covers the charge, since the fee is payable for accepted papers and is substantial relative to many researchers' discretionary funds.

Metrics and Standing

The saved record's headline figures — impact factor 5.8, h-index 279, Q1 — are corroborated in direction by every other source consulted for this profile. MDPI's own cluster table lists the same 5.8 impact factor and a CiteScore of 10.2. Aggregator listings describe Q1 placement in Food Science and in Nutrition and Dietetics, with a SCImago rank consistent with a leading generalist nutrition title. OpenAlex records 39,718 works cited 1,286,379 times, with a two-year mean citedness of 6.50 — in line with the impact-factor range. The honest reading of these numbers is that Nutrients sits in the first rank of nutrition journals by visibility and citation performance while operating at a volume far beyond traditional titles in the field. Authors should also understand what that means for an individual paper: the journal-level metrics are strong, but with tens of thousands of papers published, the citation fate of any single article depends overwhelmingly on its own quality, topic and discoverability, not on the masthead alone.

A further caution belongs in any responsible profile of this journal. High-volume open-access publishing attracts scrutiny, and nutrition as a field attracts contested claims — around supplements, functional foods and health claims in particular, all of which are named in the journal's own subject list. The journal's scope statement answers part of that concern by insisting on full experimental detail sufficient for reproduction. Readers appraising an individual Nutrients paper should apply the same discipline they would apply anywhere: check the design, the funding and conflict statements, and whether the claims match the data, rather than relying on the journal title as a proxy either for endorsement or for doubt.

Indexing and Discoverability

Aggregator listings record indexing in Scopus, Web of Science through the Science Citation Index Expanded, PubMed and Embase. A Directory of Open Access Journals listing could not be confirmed in this research — repeated foreground searches of the DOAJ search API, by ISSN in several query forms and by title, returned no record for this ISSN — so this profile makes no DOAJ claim for the journal, in either direction; the journal's open-access status itself is established by the publisher, not by DOAJ. PubMed visibility is particularly valuable in nutrition, where clinical and public-health readers search alongside basic scientists. Combined with continuous online publication and the section and special-issue structure, discoverability is one of the journal's genuine strengths: a well-titled, well-abstracted paper here is placed in front of essentially every audience that works on human nutrition.

Who Should Submit

The journal fits authors with human nutrition research — clinical trials, cohort and epidemiological studies, dietary-pattern and public-health work, sports and exercise nutrition, clinical nutrition including bariatric and sarcopenia research, nutrigenomics, and mechanistic animal or cell work that is explicitly connected to human health — who need open access, value speed, and can fund the processing charge. It also fits review authors, since reviews are a named article type and nutrition reviews in this title reach a large readership. Authors should look elsewhere if their paper has no human-health relevance to articulate, if they cannot fund the charge and no waiver or institutional agreement applies, if their institution's evaluation rules discount very high-volume titles, or if the work belongs to a neighbouring field — general food science, agriculture, or clinical medicine without a nutrition question — where a more specialised title will reach the right reviewers and readers. In all cases, the instructions for authors on the journal's site, including its requirements on experimental detail and supplementary material, should be read before submission rather than after the first editorial query.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Nutrients fully open access? Yes. MDPI states that all articles are published in full open access under a CC BY licence, with a CHF 2,900 article processing charge. A DOAJ listing could not be confirmed through the DOAJ search API during this research; check doaj.org directly for its current listing status.

Who leads the journal? MDPI's journal pages name two editors-in-chief: Prof. Dr. Maria Luz Fernandez of the University of Connecticut and Prof. Dr. Lluis Serra-Majem of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

How fast is it? MDPI's published medians are fifteen days to first decision and 2.4 days from acceptance to publication. These are publisher-reported medians across the journal, not guarantees for an individual manuscript.

What are its metrics? Impact factor 5.8 and CiteScore 10.2 in the sources consulted, an h-index of 279 in the saved record, and Q1 placement in its nutrition categories in aggregator listings.

Does it publish animal studies? Yes, where the outcomes have relevance to human health — that relevance must be made explicit, since it is written into the journal's own consideration criteria.

Preparing a Competitive Submission

The journal's own scope sentence does most of the editorial screening in advance, so the strongest preparation is to make the human-health relevance of the work impossible to miss: state it in the abstract's opening, return to it in the discussion's first paragraph, and make sure any animal or mechanistic component is explicitly connected to the human condition it informs. Reviewers for a high-volume journal read quickly; a paper whose relevance must be excavated from its final paragraph starts at a disadvantage against one whose question is clear from its title. The reproduction standard deserves equal care. MDPI asks for full experimental detail so that results can be reproduced, and in nutrition that means the details authors most often omit: the exact composition and source of diets and supplements, the assay methods and their validation, the dietary-assessment instrument and its error structure, and the handling of energy adjustment, multiplicity and missing data in the analysis. Papers that supply those details in the manuscript or in well-organised supplementary files move through review with fewer rounds of basic queries.

Choosing where inside the journal to submit is the third preparation step. A paper sent to a special issue should genuinely answer that issue's call — guest editors building a coherent collection can spot a keyword-matched mismatch immediately — while a paper sent to a regular section should name the section whose readership it seeks, such as public health, clinical nutrition or sports nutrition. Authors should also plan the practicalities before submission rather than after acceptance: confirm the processing-charge funding, register all authors' identifiers, prepare the data-availability and conflict statements the journal requires, and check that any trial involved is properly registered. The journal's published medians promise a fast first decision; authors who arrive with complete documentation are the ones who actually experience the fast timeline the publisher advertises, because incomplete files pause at every editorial checkpoint regardless of the journal's overall speed.

A final consideration is how the journal's scale affects reading as well as publishing. With tens of thousands of papers in the backfile and new content appearing continuously, no reader follows the journal issue by issue in the traditional sense; discovery happens through section pages, special-issue collections, alerting services and database search. That reality rewards authors who invest in the discoverability of their own work — a title that names the population, intervention and outcome plainly, an abstract structured around the health question, and keywords drawn from the journal's own subject vocabulary — and it rewards readers who filter deliberately, following the sections and guest-edited collections in their subfield rather than the journal as a whole. Understood that way, the journal functions less like a single periodical and more like a large, organised library of nutrition research with a common editorial standard, and both its strengths and its criticisms follow from that character.

Prospective authors should also verify the current charge, licence options and any institutional publishing agreement on the journal's own pages at the moment of submission, since open-access charges across large publishers are revised periodically and the figure recorded in this profile — CHF 2,900, as listed by MDPI at the time of research — is a snapshot, not a tariff guaranteed for future years.

Sources and Verification

This profile is grounded in the journal's saved Journals World record (ISSN, coverage from 2009, h-index, impact factor, quartile and country), MDPI's aims and scope page and journal-cluster table (scope, subject areas, article types, launch year, CiteScore, timelines, charge and editors-in-chief, as retrieved in search results from mdpi.com), MDPI's published licence and charge statements on its journal pages and articles, and the OpenAlex source record for the same ISSN (S110785341), fetched directly and re-verified in foreground checks during this research (works, citations and mean citedness). Repeated foreground DOAJ search-API queries for this ISSN returned no record, and no DOAJ-based claim is made anywhere in this profile. Where a figure is publisher-reported — the timelines above all — it is labelled as such in the text. The numeric publisher code in the older stored record is flagged in the coordinator report; the publisher name used here, MDPI of Switzerland, is confirmed by MDPI's own pages and by the OpenAlex host-organisation field.