We’re proud to support the science behind Nobel prizes

This blog post draws from the original article published by Springer Nature, “Giving Research the Attention It Deserves,” which you can read in full here.

It’s the start of October, and for those of us in and around the research community that means it’s time to get excited about learning who, and what, will be selected for the Nobel prize this year.

Nobel season emphasizes to all of us the importance of fundamental research, and the contribution it makes to shaping our world. For over 150 years, Nature and the Nature Portfolio of journals have focused on giving important research advances a platform and we are grateful that 75% of the researchers who have received scientific Nobel prizes (Physiology or Medicine, Chemistry, Physics) in the past 50 years have chosen to publish at least some of their work in Nature and Nature Portfolio journals.

Across our Nature-branded research journals we currently employ over 450 full-time professional editors for research manuscripts. For Nature itself, this means that each editor carefully evaluates 12 papers to find one that the community would expect to see in the journal.

All of that care is manifest in the value we give authors in terms of the recognition and visibility of their work. As an illustration, research articles in Nature-branded journals published in 2024 have each been cited on average 21.7 times per year, 8 times more than articles published in an average Springer Nature journal, which are cited 2.8 times on average, and downloaded over 12,000 times per year, compared to just over 900 times at an average journal—an impressive 13 times more.

In her first blog post for Springer Nature, Deborah Sweet, Executive Vice President of Nature Portfolio Journals, explores how high-quality publishing helps to unlock the full value of research. Read her blog “Giving Research the Attention It Deserves” here.