Nature Medicine Impact Factor 2026: 52.5 (2025 JIF)
Nature Medicine publishes a 52.5 Impact Factor and a 52.5 five-year JIF, with a median 4 days to first editorial decision and 117 days to acceptance.
Alex Carter
Founder, SciFig
Nature Medicine's Journal Impact Factor is 52.5 — the 2025 value, from the 2026 JCR release.
Its five-year Impact Factor is also 52.5, which is unusual: for most journals the two diverge, and a flat pair means the citation performance has been stable rather than driven by one exceptional year.
What is Nature Medicine's impact factor?
The journal's own Journal Metrics page lists a Journal Impact Factor: 52.5 (2025) and a 5-year Journal Impact Factor of 52.5 (2025). Clarivate's 2026 JCR release reports 2025 data, so the full label is "2025 Journal Impact Factor, 2026 JCR release".
The same page carries a caveat from the publisher, not from us: Springer Nature is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, and states that citation measures like the two-year JIF are not necessarily measures of journal quality. Use the number to place the journal in a tier, then judge fit on scope and article type.
Nature Medicine at a glance
The metrics tell you about the journal. The limits below tell you what you will actually have to produce, including every scientific figure in the paper.
The journal writes the metric as 52.5 (2025); the release that carries it is Clarivate's 2026 JCR. Both labels are correct and they mean different things — 2025 is the data year, 2026 is the release year.
When you line Nature Medicine up against another journal, check that the other value is also a 2025 JIF. Comparing across release years is the single most common way a journal shortlist goes wrong.
Is Nature Medicine Q1? Quartile and category rank
For any practical purpose, yes. Q1 means the top 25% of a JCR subject category by Impact Factor, and Nature Medicine's 52.5 sits at the top of any medical or translational category — comfortably inside the first quartile on that definition.
What the journal itself does not publish is the literal quartile or category rank: its metrics page leads with the Impact Factor and with Springer Nature's DORA position on why it does not front rankings. If a promotion file or grant form demands the exact "n of N in category" line, that field lives in the Journal Citation Reports record rather than on the journal's own pages — cite it with the category name and the release year attached, the same way you would cite the JIF.
Nature Medicine vs JAMA and the Nature Portfolio journals
Nature Medicine sits between two neighbours that authors often weigh against it.
Against JAMA: JAMA is a general medical journal organised around clinical trials and health policy, with hard article-type caps — 3000 words and five display items for an Original Investigation — no open access option, and a median first decision of two days. Nature Medicine is translational and clinical, allows 4,000 words and 6 items for an Article, and offers gold open access at a price.
Against the rest of the Nature Portfolio: Nature and Nature Communications share the portfolio's editorial policies but not its figure specifications — each journal sets its own widths, resolutions, and length limits, so never carry a specification across from a sister journal.
What this number does not tell you
The Impact Factor does not tell you:
whether an editor will send the paper for review — the median first editorial decision is 4 days;
how long the full path runs — the median from submission to acceptance is 117 days;
whether your work fits an Article, a Brief Communication, or a Resource, each with different limits;
what the figures must look like at the accepted-in-principle stage;
or whether your funder's open-access mandate can be met without paying the APC.
Preparing figures for Nature Medicine
Nature Medicine's figure rules only bind at the accepted-in-principle stage, but they are specific when they do: panels at a minimum of 300 dpi, a maximum width of 180 mm, 5–7 pt sans-serif labelling, and scale bars rather than magnification factors.
The one to plan for from the start is this: labelling and scale bars must not be flattened onto images. The journal names uneditable and low-resolution images as two of the most common causes of delay in manuscript preparation.
If the figure already exists, Vector Canvas turns it into editable vector layers — every shape, label, and colour becomes a separate object you can correct — and exports layered SVG.
Figure Enhancer takes a figure you already have and refines its text, improves clarity, and upscales it to 8K without starting over; labels and layout stay editable afterwards.
For grant, conference, institutional, or teaching work where AI-generated visuals are allowed, you can also explore Text-to-Figure for a new generated draft.
Keep your labels editable from the first draft
Nature Medicine names uneditable images as a leading cause of production delay. Build the figure so labels stay live.
Consider it when the work is translational or clinical with consequences beyond a single specialty, when the evidence fits 4,000 words and 6 items, and when a 117 days median to acceptance fits your timeline.
Think twice when the result is preliminary — the 4 days median for a first editorial decision means most papers are assessed on scope and significance before any reviewer sees them — or when neither your institution nor your funder can cover a $12,850 APC and your mandate requires immediate open access.
The Nature Medicine submission guide covers content types, the presubmission enquiry route, double-anonymized review, and the two publishing options in detail.
Draft the figures alongside the manuscript
Six display items is the budget for an Article. Decide what each one carries before the writing locks it in.
