Content Types

Review | Perspective | Comment | Down to Business 

How we work

Our team of in-house editors, art editors, production editors and proofreaders work together with authors to produce authoritative, accessible, high-quality articles; see a visual summary of the editorial process.

While the majority of content (see below for content types) in Nature Reviews Bioengineering will be commissioned by our editors, we do welcome proposals. Please submit these using our online submission system. Advice on how to pitch can be found on this blog post.

Review

A Review is an authoritative, balanced survey of recent developments in a research field. Although Reviews should be recognized as scholarly by specialists in the field, they should be written to be accessible to non-specialist readers. Reviews should therefore be presented using simple prose, avoiding excessive jargon and technical detail. The scope of a Review should be broad enough that it is not dominated by the work of a single research institution and particularly not by the authors' own work.

Reviews are approximately 6,000 words long and typically include 5–7 display items (figures, tables and/or boxes). As a guideline, Reviews contain up to 150 references; citations should be selective. Footnotes are not used. Further information can be found in our guidelines for Reviews. 

Perspective

A Perspective is an opinionated review of a topic, offering a slightly different perspective, as the name suggests. They may be more forward-looking and/or speculative than Reviews and typically have a narrower scope. Despite being opinionated, they should remain balanced and are intended to stimulate discussion and new approaches.

Perspectives are typically shorter than Reviews, at approximately 5,000 words long and including 4–6 display items (figures, tables and/or boxes). Further information is available in our guidelines for Perspectives.

Comment

Our Comment articles are usually agenda-setting, authoritative, informed and often provocative expert pieces calling for action on topical issues pertaining to scientific research and/or its political, ethical and social ramifications. Comments are generally not peer-reviewed (unless we feel that peer-reviewing is important to improve the content of the article), and we encourage authors to express their opinions. Our Comments are fairly short (~1,200 words long, 2-3 pages in final layout; 10 references; they can have one image). Further information can be found in our guidelines for Comments.

Down to Business

Down to Business articles are short comment-type articles by experts discussing how they took their research all the way from the idea to a product, including regulatory considerations, intellectual property considerations, scale-up, industry collaborations, manufacturing and application, outlining the scientific and technical challenges associated with technology transfer.