Nature turns away more than nine in ten papers submitted to it
Getting published in Nature can make a scientific career: fewer than 8 percent of submissions are accepted. Yet the journal began in 1869 not as an elite gatekeeper but as a public forum, one of a wave of Victorian periodicals meant to connect ordinary readers with the world of science.
Norman Lockyer and the publisher Alexander MacMillan launched Nature in the autumn of 1869. Nineteenth-century science was booming, with major work appearing in German and French as well as English, and Britain was transforming technologically. The Royal Society's refereed journals, which had carried work by Newton, Faraday and Darwin, held the highest prestige. Meanwhile popular science periodicals doubled in number between the 1850s and 1860s, their editors describing them as organs of science that brought the public closer to research.
The journal grew in stages. In the mid-twentieth century it expanded its explanatory writing and science journalism. In the late 1980s and early 1990s it opened editorial offices outside Britain and launched ten specialist spin-offs such as Nature Materials. Since the late 2000s it has run weekly editorial and current-affairs columns and even endorsed candidates in elections. Now part of Springer Nature, it runs editorial teams on three continents, with London still a base.
Its core product is the research paper, lightly edited, technical and dense, and usually a compressed summary of a larger project because of strict length limits. Research scientists remain its main authors, and editors focus mainly on technical readability. Alongside papers it prints commentary on funding, policy and ethics, news, book and arts coverage and short science fiction. Spotlight pieces on breakthroughs read like magazine articles, do not count as research, and are sometimes sponsored.
The influence is measurable. Nature's 2022 impact factor of 50.5 ranked among the highest for multidisciplinary journals, and in 2007 it shared the Prince of Asturias Award for Communications and Humanity with Science. By 2012 it claimed about three million unique online readers a month. That visibility cuts both ways: the journal has been drawn into disputes over retractions, peer review and research methods.
Source: Nature (journal)
