Aims & Scope

Open-access journal publishing high quality, editorially selected and peer reviewed advances across clinical, translational, and public health research.

Communications Medicine is a selective open access journal from Nature Portfolio publishing high-quality research, reviews and commentary across all clinical, translational, and public health research fields. The journal aims to foster collaboration across these different communities to facilitate discovery that will promote health and improve patients’ lives globally. Primary research papers published by the journal represent significant advances in preventing, diagnosing, or treating human disease.

Communications Medicine is supportive of Springer Nature’s effort to advance progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular SDG3: Good health and wellbeing and SDG5: Gender equality. We welcome submissions that are relevant to the goals of ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all at all ages, as well as of promoting gender equality in health, medical practice, and research.

The scope of Communications Medicine covers studies in:

• all clinical specialties, such as oncology, cardiology or neurology

• any area of translational research that integrates scientific understanding of biomarkers, non-clinical, clinical or molecular data with clinical outcomes

• emerging and less traditional fields, such as precision medicine or microbiome-based therapies

• regional or global public health and epidemiology

• the intersection of medicine with other scientific disciplines, such as computational science and physics, where the central advance of the study is of interest to the medical community, for example digital medicine, medical devices, imaging.

Primary research published in Communications Medicine includes the following study types:

• observational and interventional clinical studies (all phases of trials and case studies/series)

• Registered Reports: in particular, we welcome submissions of clinical trials under this format (Study protocol as Stage 1 manuscript and the completed trial as Stage 2 manuscript). We also consider submissions proposing high-value scientifically-justified replication studies, 

• observational and interventional epidemiological studies (prospective and retrospective)

• systematic reviews and meta-analysis

• new methods, technologies or resources of significant translational or clinical relevance

• studies in pre-clinical models of significant relevance to disease diagnosis/therapy

Criteria for publication:

To be published in Communications Medicine a paper should meet several general criteria:

• The results are novel (novelty is not compromised by either abstracts or internet preprints)
• The paper provides strong evidence for its conclusions
• The data are technically sound
• The manuscript is important to scientists or clinicians in a specific sub-field of medicine or public health
• Results are reported following ICMJE and EQUATOR recommendations

In general, to be acceptable, a paper should represent an advance in understanding which may influence thinking in the field.

Communications Medicine also publishes Reviews, Perspectives and other non-research content and provides a forum for discussing and contextualizing issues of importance to scientists and medical researchers across all the communities in our readership, regardless of sub-discipline or specialty, with the aim of driving progress in medical research, practices and policies.