Nature (journal)

• 1. Introduction

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  Nature, the British weekly scientific journal, turned down Enrico Fermi's paper on the weak interaction theory of beta decay because editors decided it was too remote from reality. That paper went on to become foundational to nuclear physics. It is one of many such moments in a publication history that stretches back to the autumn of 1869, when a former editor of a failed literary magazine decided to try again with a new title and a grander ambition. How does a journal built on the premise of connecting science to the public become, over a century and a half, one of the most cited scientific publications in the world? And what happens when the pursuit of prestige collides with the messiness of real science?

• 2. A Crowded Field

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  Popular science periodicals in Britain roughly doubled in number between the 1850s and 1860s, each promising to serve as what their editors called "organs of science." Among them was Recreative Science, founded in 1859 as a natural history magazine that gradually expanded to cover astronomy and archaeology. A companion journal, the Popular Science Review, launched in 1862 and organized its coverage into sections it called "Scientific Summary" and "Quarterly Retrospect." Closest in spirit to Nature was The Reader, created in 1863, which blended science with literature and art to pull in readers from outside the scientific community. One by one, all of these journals failed. The Reader folded in 1867. Scientific Opinion lasted barely two years, shutting in June 1870. The Popular Science Review survived the longest, enduring for twenty years before closing in 1881. Norman Lockyer, who had edited The Reader, watched this parade of closures and began planning something different.

• 3. The X Club and a Liberal Science

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  Lockyer named his new journal after a line from William Wordsworth: "To the solid ground of nature trusts the Mind that builds for aye." Alexander Macmillan owned and published it, and the financial backing of the Macmillan family in those early years gave the journal room to develop more freely than its predecessors. The early editions leaned heavily on contributors from a group that called itself the X Club, initiated by Thomas Henry Huxley and including Joseph Dalton Hooker, Herbert Spencer, and John Tyndall, along with five other scientists and mathematicians. What bound them together was a shared and at the time controversial commitment to Darwin's theory of evolution as common descent, a position that drew criticism from more conservative corners of Victorian science. Scholar Janet Browne has argued that, far more than any other science journal of the period, Nature was conceived and raised to serve a polemic purpose. John Maddox, who would edit the journal from 1966 to 1973 and again from 1980 to 1995, offered a different explanation at the journal's centennial dinner: journalism, he said, "is a way of creating a sense of community among people who would otherwise be isolated from each other. This is what Lockyer's journal did from the start."

• 4. Editors and Expansion

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  Lockyer was a professor at Imperial College, and he held the editorship until 1919, when Sir Richard Gregory succeeded him. Gregory's obituary by the Royal Society noted that he "always gave generous space to accounts of the activities of the International Scientific Unions," a priority that pushed Nature firmly into international standing. Between 1945 and 1973, editorial control passed three times: first to A. J. V. Gale and L. J. F. Brimble jointly, then to Brimble alone in 1958, then to John Maddox in 1965, and finally to David Davies in 1973. Maddox returned in 1980 and stayed until 1995. Under his first tenure, in 1971, the journal briefly split into three separate publications: Nature Physical Sciences on Mondays, Nature New Biology on Wednesdays, and Nature on Fridays. The experiment lasted only until 1974, when the titles were merged back. Starting in the 1980s, Nature launched more than ten new journals, gathering them under a publishing group created in 1999. In 1970, Nature opened its first office outside Britain, in Washington; New York followed in 1985, Tokyo and Munich in 1987, Paris in 1989, San Francisco in 2001, Boston in 2004, and Hong Kong in 2005.

• 5. The Weight of Publication

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  Fewer than eight percent of papers submitted to Nature are accepted for publication. Most are turned away before peer review even begins, rejected on the grounds that they do not address a sufficiently topical or ground-breaking subject. For those that do advance, the editor selects reviewers with relevant expertise who have no connection to the research, and the resulting critiques are returned to the authors for revision. The journal's impact factor stood at 42.778 in 2019 and reached 50.5 by the 2022 Journal Citation Reports, placing it among the highest-ranked multidisciplinary science journals. Yet studies of methodological quality have found that some high-prestige journals, including Nature, "publish significantly substandard structures," and that the reliability of published research may, in some fields, actually decrease as journal rank increases. The journal's original mission statement, published at its founding, declared two goals: to place the results of scientific work before the general public and to aid scientists by giving them early information of advances and a forum for discussion. A later revision of that statement updated the language but kept both purposes intact.

• 6. Landmark Papers and Famous Rejections

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  Watson and Crick's 1953 paper on the structure of DNA appeared in Nature without being sent to peer review. Maddox later explained that the paper "could not have been refereed: its correctness is self-evident." That paper joined a list of publications in Nature that also includes the discovery of the neutron, the first description of nuclear fission, the identification of plate tectonics, the discovery of pulsars, the documentation of the ozone hole, the first cloning of a mammal in the form of Dolly the sheep, and the sequencing of the human genome. Against this record sits a parallel list of rejections the journal has since acknowledged. A 2003 editorial called "Coping with Peer Rejection" named several: the rejection of Cherenkov radiation, Hideki Yukawa's meson, work on photosynthesis by Johann Deisenhofer, Robert Huber, and Hartmut Michel, and the initial rejection of Stephen Hawking's black-hole radiation. Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield's research on MRI was also rejected; only after Lauterbur appealed did Nature publish their work. They later received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Fermi's weak interaction paper, rejected as too remote from reality, was published instead by Zeitschrift fur Physik in 1934.

• 7. Controversies and Public Trust

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  In June 1988, Nature published a paper by Jacques Benveniste and colleagues that claimed less than a single molecule of antibody, diluted in water, could trigger an immune response in human basophils. The finding contradicted the physical law of mass action. The paper drew particular attention in Paris partly because the research had received funding from homeopathic medicine companies. Public inquiry led Nature to require a stringent experimental replication in Benveniste's lab; the results of his team's work were not replicated. On the 30th of October 2008, Nature endorsed a US presidential candidate for the first time, supporting Barack Obama. Before the election for the 46th President, it published an editorial titled "Why Nature Supports Joe Biden for US President." Philosopher of science Byron Hyde has argued that repeated presidential endorsements since 2012 were a mistake and that any benefits are overshadowed by the loss of public trust. Political scientist Ffloyd Jiuyun Zhang found that the Biden endorsement decreased trust in Nature and in the institution of science more broadly. In 2017, an editorial titled "Removing Statues of Historical Figures Risks Whitewashing History: Science Must Acknowledge Mistakes as it Marks its Past" drew condemnation, arriving shortly after the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Philip Campbell, then editor, updated the editorial on the 18th of September 2017, and Nature acknowledged that the original version was "offensive and poorly worded." In April 2020, the journal apologized for early pandemic coverage that linked China and the city of Wuhan with the COVID-19 outbreak in ways that may have contributed to racist attacks.

• 8. Science Fiction and Outreach

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  In 1999, Nature began publishing short science fiction stories under the series title "Futures." The vignettes ran in 1999 and 2000, returned in 2005 and 2006, and have appeared weekly since July 2007. Sister publication Nature Physics also printed stories in 2007 and 2008. In 2005, the European Science Fiction Society named Nature its Best Publisher for the "Futures" series. One hundred of the stories published between 1999 and 2006 were collected in a volume called Futures from Nature, published in 2008. A second collection, Futures from Nature 2, followed in 2014. The journal's broader outreach extended to a Nature Podcast launched in 2005, presented by Kerri Smith and founded by clinician and virologist Chris Smith of Cambridge. The first hundred episodes were produced and presented by Chris Smith. In 2012, an Arabic edition of the magazine launched in partnership with King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, with around 10,000 subscribers at launch. In 2007, Nature, together with Science, received the Prince of Asturias Award for Communications and Humanity, a recognition that placed two of the most competitive journals in global science on the same stage for the same honor.