Journal Information

Launched in January 2017, Nature Biomedical Engineering is an online-only monthly journal publishing original research, reviews and commentary of high significance to the biomedical engineering community, including bench scientists interested in devising materials, methods, technologies or therapies to understand or combat disease, engineers designing or optimizing medical devices and procedures, and clinicians leveraging research outputs in biomedical engineering to assess patient health or deliver therapy across a variety of clinical settings and healthcare contexts.

Like all Nature-branded journals, Nature Biomedical Engineering is run by a dedicated team of professional editors, and provides fair and rigorous peer review, high standards of copy-editing and production, swift publication and editorial independence. All editorial decisions are made by the editors.

Aims & Scope

Straddling the life sciences, the physical sciences and engineering, Nature Biomedical Engineering aims to bring together the most important advances from the broad discipline of biomedical engineering, enhancing their visibility through opinion and news articles, and providing overviews of the state of the art in each field. The journal's scope includes materials, therapies and devices that facilitate the understanding of human disease, or lead to improvements in human health or healthcare. For more information, please see Aims & Scope.

Content types

Nature Biomedical Engineering publishes original research in one format: Article. Review Articles are authoritative and balanced discussions of published research developments. Informed discussion of topical matters or of published findings and their prospects, and involving opinions and viewpoints, are published as Perspectives, Comments, and News & Views. For additional explanations and for formatting requirements, please see Content types.

Online publication

Nature Biomedical Engineering is an exclusively online publication. Articles are published weekly, and as soon as they are ready. Papers published online are definitive and may be altered only through the publication of an Addendum, Author Correction or Publisher Correction, so authors should make every effort to ensure that page proofs are correct.

About the editors

Like all the other Nature-branded titles, Nature Biomedical Engineering has no external editorial board. Instead, all editorial decisions are made by a dedicated team of professional editors. For information on their editorial and research backgrounds, please see About the editors.

Contact

Enquiries should be sent to nBME@nature.com. General editorial enquiries and correspondence should be addressed to the Editor, and enquiries about the status of a manuscript should be addressed to the Editorial Assistant. To enquire about institutional access, advertising or marketing, please contact the appropriate department.

Relationship to other Nature journals

Nature Biomedical Engineering is editorially independent; its editors make their own decisions, independently of other journals from Nature Research. If a paper is rejected from one Nature journal, the authors can use an automated manuscript transfer service to submit the paper to another Nature journal via a transfer link sent to them by the editor handling the manuscript. Authors should note that any referee reports (including any confidential comments to the editor) and reviewer identities are transferred to the editors of the receiving journal along with the manuscript. The editors will take these reports into account when making their decision, although in some cases they may choose to take advice from additional or alternative referees. Alternatively, authors may choose to request a fresh review, in which case they should not use the transfer link; the editors will then evaluate the paper without reference to the previous review process. More details are available on the manuscript transfer service and on the relationships between Nature-branded titles.

For papers that could satisfy the scope of more than one Nature journal, the choice of which journal to submit to first lies with the authors.

Journal abbreviation

The correct abbreviation for abstracting and indexing purposes is Nat. Biomed. Eng.

How to cite our content

Before August 2017, each piece of content was assigned a DOI (digital object identifier) and an article number. From August 2017, each piece of content is assigned a DOI and is then paginated when it appears in an issue. Article numbers are no longer assigned. To cite our content, follow these guidelines:

For paginated content published from August 2017:

Surname, N. Title of piece. Nat. Biomed. Eng. VolumeNumber, StartPage–EndPage (Year).

For non-paginated content published from August 2017:

Surname, N. Title of the piece. Nat. Biomed. Eng. https://doi.org/DOI (Year).

(Please note that content published without page numbers will be paginated when it appears in an issue.)

For content published before August 2017:

Surname, N. Title of piece. Nat. Biomed. Eng. VolumeNumber, ArticleNumber (Year).

Please note that that, typically, page numbers are separated by an en dash (rather than a hyphen), and that when the number of authors is 5 or less, their names should be included in the citation (for example: Surname1, N., Surname2, N. N. & Surname3, N.); otherwise, use Surname, N. et al. Citation information for every piece of content is available either at the top of the page or under the 'Info' tab, and can be downloaded as a RIS file.

EISSN

Our electronic international standard serial number (EISSN) is 2157-846X.

Journal and article metrics

For a summary and description of journal metrics, see our journal metrics page. The journal dashboard, updated about every three months, provides a historical timeline of a few specific journal metrics.

Article metrics such as citations and online attention are available from each article page, and provide an overview of the attention received by a paper.