Aims & Scope

Open-access journal publishing high quality, editorially selected and peer reviewed advances across clinical, translational, and public health research.

Communications Medicine is a selective open access journal from Nature Portfolio publishing high-quality research, reviews and commentary across all clinical, translational, and public health research fields. The journal aims to foster collaboration across these different communities to facilitate discovery that will promote health and improve patients’ lives. Primary research papers published by the journal represent significant advances in preventing, diagnosing, or treating human disease of relevance to a specialized field. We provide a forum to discuss issues of importance to researchers across all the communities in our readership, regardless of sub-discipline or medical specialty.

The scope of Communications Medicine covers studies in:

  • all clinical specialties, such as oncology, cardiology or neurology
  • emerging fields, such as precision medicine or microbiome-based therapies
  • any area of translational research
  • regional or global public health 

We are also interested in submissions at the intersection of medicine with other scientific disciplines, such as computational science and physics, where the central advance of the study is of interest to the medical community, for example digital medicine and medical devices or imaging.

Communications Medicine is supportive of Springer Nature’s effort to advance progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular SDG3: Good health and wellbeing and SDG5: Gender equality. We welcome submissions that are relevant to the goals of ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all at all ages, as well as of promoting gender equality in health, medical practice, and research.

Primary research published in Communications Medicine includes the following study types:

  • observational and interventional clinical studies (all phases of trials and case studies/series)
  • observational and interventional epidemiological studies (prospective and retrospective)
  • systematic reviews and meta-analysis
  • new methods, technologies or resources of significant translational or clinical relevance
  • studies in pre-clinical models of significant relevance to disease diagnosis/therapy

The submission and review processes are managed by our in-house professional editors supported by our Editorial Board Members, who provide technical expertise across the breadth of the clinical, translational and public health research fields. We are committed to rapid dissemination of important research results. Articles are published on a continuous basis with minimal time from acceptance to publication.

Criteria for publication

To be published in Communications Medicine a paper should meet several general criteria:

In general, to be acceptable, a paper should represent an advance in understanding which may influence thinking in the field.