In our inaugural Editorial in 20191, we set out to capture “the full breadth of metabolism research — from fundamental cell biology to biomedical and translational research”. Five years on, we believe we have delivered on this vision. Complementing our broad content on metabolic physiology and disease, Nature Metabolism has also provided a home for basic mechanistic and biochemical studies in a metabolic context, as well as for innovative work carried out in model organisms. We have also featured notable advances in microbial metabolism and the genetic basis of metabolic traits — two examples of subfields whose communities have, in our view, not yet been served well by a broad metabolic journal. In addition, we have gradually expanded our footprint in translational and clinical research, with an emphasis on areas that represent touching points between basic and clinician scientists2.

We are immensely grateful to the scientific community, who have supported us on this journey with growing submissions year on year. Our editorial team has also expanded in line with submissions and over the years, we have introduced new content types, such as Resource articles and Correspondences.

We were particularly pleased to see many young investigators publishing as lead authors in our pages, which led to the inception of our Career Pathways series. These inspiring and sometimes rather personal stories have since become a recurring feature and are one example of our efforts to support young investigators and to increase their visibility in the wider metabolism community.

Over the past five years, we have worked hard to improve reproducibility and reporting efforts in our community. A case in point is our growing collection of commissioned articles on best practices in experimental design, analysis and reporting in metabolic research, which we hope serves as a useful resource for researchers across all career stages.

Since 2019, we have been listing the primary handling editor on peer reviewed manuscripts. In the coming months, we will take another step in increasing transparency by introducing transparent peer review for new submissions at Nature Metabolism. We pride ourselves on providing authors with guidance for their revisions and helping them to navigate the revision process. We thus welcome the opportunity to offer our readers deeper insight into our peer review and decision-making process.

We have also spearheaded efforts at Springer Nature to improve reporting of sex and gender3. This trial has led to the inclusion of text in the abstract and methods sections in numerous papers to highlight whether a study has been carried out predominantly using animals of one sex. When identified early during the revision process, we have also encouraged, and oftentimes convinced, authors to repeat key experiments in animals of both sexes. In view of these positive developments, we will now make this SAGER guidance a permanent feature at Nature Metabolism, with other Springer Nature journals likely to follow.

Five years is roughly the time it takes to complete a PhD or a university degree. The thought that a generation of students has now graduated for whom Nature Metabolism has been a permanent fixture in the scientific literature is genuinely gratifying and highly motivating for us. Just like graduation for students, our five-year anniversary marks merely the beginning.