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On this page: Article types and instructions | Writing tips | How to submit | Publishing model

Article types and instructions

Nature Reviews Rheumatology publishes a wide variety of article types. You can find an overview of the article types and the article format guides below. Please check with your editor if you are unsure about the article type you were asked to write. Please also ensure that you have read and understood our editorial policies.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, do not currently satisfy our authorship criteria. Notably an attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, which cannot be effectively applied to LLMs. Use of an LLM should be properly documented in the Methods section (and if a Methods section is not available, in a suitable alternative part) of the manuscript.

Review-type articles

• Review articles provide accessible, authoritative and balanced overviews of a field or topic.
• Perspective articles provide a forum for opinionated discussions of a field or topic, as well as describing historical foundations and influences, emerging research trends and techniques, and ethical, legal and societal issues.
• Consensus Statement articles are comprehensive analyses — and their agreed outcomes — by a panel of experts on a scientific or medical issue.
• Evidence-Based Guidelines are evidence-based, systematically developed recommendations for achieving standardized research or clinical practice.
• Expert Recommendation articles are collective opinion pieces, authored by panels of specialists, that present the outcome of an analysis or discussion, and suggest a course of action, best scientific practices or methodological guidelines.
• Roadmap articles provide a forward-looking outline of the scientific and technical challenges and opportunities in a certain field, providing a sense of direction and setting out the necessary steps. 

News and Comment

• News & Views articles are based on recent publications and provide a forum in which advances can be communicated and put into context. These are timely, topical, succinct commentaries that discuss key issues arising from the papers under discussion in a journalistic style.
• Comment articles are 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; discussions of purely scientific issues are also covered. 
• World View articles draw on one person's experience or expertise to make a call for action to improve science, address injustice, reduce misery, or fulfil some other societal goal.
• Viewpoint articles provide a forum for several researchers to discuss — in a Q&A format — issues associated with a specific field of interest. Viewpoint articles are not peer reviewed and provide an opportunity for researchers to express their views.
• Year in Review articles highlight the top three to five papers published in the preceding year in specific research areas. The article should discuss the key advances of the papers and set the findings into the broader context of the field. These articles are commissioned once a year.
• Correspondence articles provide a forum for comment on papers published in this journal and might be accompanied by a reply from the authors of the original article. Correspondence articles may be peer-reviewed at the editors’ discretion.

Writing tips

Articles written for the Nature Reviews journals are targeted towards readers from an advanced undergraduate level upwards in addition to being of interest to specialists, and should be accessible to readers working in related disciplines. Some basic guidelines to improve clarity and readability of your article are:

• Authors should provide sufficient background information to ensure the discussion can be understood by non-expert readers.
• Authors should discuss the implication of the work under discussion, rather than simply describe a study's findings.
• Although the discussion within an article should be balanced, authors should not list or describe every paper within the field; we expect authors to select, discuss and interpret the papers they feel are most important.

Overuse of abbreviations, acronyms or jargon-laden language can hamper readability. Authors should, therefore, use plain language to explain concepts and restrict the use of abbreviations while adhering to the agreed word limit. 

Our typographic and house styles are used to ensure clarity and consistency within and between articles and journals. Some useful tips to help you prepare an article for publication in a Nature Reviews journal are:

• Use standard gene and protein nomenclature — for example, human genes (uppercase and italic), human proteins (uppercase), mouse genes (first letter only uppercase and italic) and mouse proteins (uppercase). If it’s not clear which species is being referred to, we default to human nomenclature; thus, please specify when referring to mouse genes. To avoid delays at the proof stage, please consult the appropriate nomenclature databases for standard gene names and symbols. Useful resources are  https://www.genenames.org/, https://www.ensembl.org/ and http://www.uniprot.org/.
• Use SI units in all instances.
• For drugs, use International Nonproprietary Names as a default whenever possible.

How to submit

Synopses and manuscripts must be submitted electronically through our online submission system, using the link and instructions provided by the editor. Proposals should also be submitted through the journal’s online submission system in the form of a synopsis (consisting of a 200‑word abstract, a brief description of the main article sections, a list of key references and the list of authors and their affiliations). Please note that we consider proposals only for Review-type and Comment-type articles and that we do not publish original research, case studies, meta-analyses or systematic reviews. 

Publishing model

Articles published in Nature Reviews can only be published using the subscription publication route; we do not offer an immediate gold open access (OA) publication option.  

Nature Reviews only publishes non-primary articles  (such as Reviews, News & Views and Comment articles). In contrast to primary articles (that is, research articles), non-primary articles do not include original (previously unpublished) research findings and may only contain minimal re-analyses of published data.

Six months after the date of online publication, authors of articles published in the Nature Reviews journals can self-archive the accepted manuscript on their own personal website and/or in their funder or institutional repositories. By agreeing to write for a Nature Reviews journal, authors agree to accept our standard licensing terms including our self-archiving policies. Those standard licensing terms supersede any other terms that the author or any third party may assert apply to any version of the manuscript.