Nature Medicine’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

Nature Medicine’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a specific, illustrative instance of the general Journal Impact Factor metric published annually by Clarivate in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Nature Medicine — a monthly biomedical and clinical research journal first published in 1995 — is a distinct title from Nature, Nature Communications, and the 60-plus other journals in the Nature Portfolio published by Springer Nature. Each of those titles is indexed and scored separately by Clarivate, so a JIF reported under one Nature Portfolio journal’s name is never Nature Medicine’s own figure, even though all share the “Nature” brand and the same publisher.

What the number actually measures

The JIF is a ratio: citations received in a given year to citable items (articles and reviews) the journal published in the two preceding years, divided by the number of those citable items. Nature Medicine is indexed in Clarivate’s Science Citation Index Expanded and scored within the General & Internal Medicine JCR category, where it consistently ranks among the highest-scoring primary research journals in medicine.

Nature Medicine is a peer-reviewed research journal covering biomedical research with direct clinical or translational relevance — distinct in scope from Nature’s multidisciplinary coverage and from Nature Communications’ broader, open-access remit across all of science. The JIF applies only to the peer-reviewed research content Clarivate tracks, not to any editorial or news content the journal may also carry.

Current figure — sourced directly from Nature Portfolio, not an aggregator

As published on Nature Medicine’s own journal-impact page, nature.com/nm/journal-impact, the 2-year Journal Impact Factor is 52.5, and the 5-year Impact Factor is also 52.5, both for the 2025 JCR data year (the JCR release covering that data year is issued each June; the 2025-data-year figures were released in June 2026). This figure is Nature Portfolio’s own republication of the Clarivate/JCR number for its journal — it is not taken from a third-party JCR-tracking aggregator or from a Wikipedia infobox, either of which can lag behind or drift from the vintage Clarivate actually released. Last verified directly against nature.com/nm/journal-impact: August 16, 2026.

Clarivate updates JCR figures every June, so this number — like every JIF on this page — is a property of the 2025 data year’s release, not a fixed, permanent property of the journal. Two-year JIFs for many biomedical journals rose sharply during the pandemic-era citation surge in earlier JCR releases and have since declined as that citation window aged out; treat any older figure for this journal you may encounter elsewhere, including on other sites, as out of date unless it is explicitly labeled with its JCR data year. Always check nature.com/nm/journal-impact directly for the current figure before citing it in a formal context.

Worked example

If Nature Medicine published roughly 200 citable items across the two preceding years, and those items collectively received about 10,500 citations in the JCR data year, the resulting JIF would be 10,500 / 200 = 52.5 — the same mechanical calculation Clarivate applies to every JCR-indexed journal. Nature Medicine’s comparatively low annual publication volume next to a high-volume mega-journal is part of why a single highly cited paper can move its JIF more than it would for a journal publishing thousands of citable items a year.

Why this number alone is a poor stand-in for quality

Citation-tracking organizations including DORA, the CoARA coalition, and Clarivate itself caution against over-relying on a single journal-level metric to judge an individual article or researcher. Nature Medicine’s own selectivity and prestige make this caution especially relevant in practice: because so much weight is informally attached to a “Nature Medicine paper” in biomedical hiring and grant review, it is tempting to treat the journal’s JIF as if it described the citation performance of any specific article published there, or of the researchers who wrote it. DORA’s core recommendation is not to eliminate the JIF, but to stop using it as a proxy for the quality of a specific paper or the merit of an individual researcher’s work in hiring, tenure, promotion, or grant-review decisions.

Counter-example

Nature Medicine’s CiteScore (a separate Elsevier/Scopus metric using a four-year citation window and a broader document set) is not the same figure as its Clarivate JIF, and reporting one as if it were the other is a common sourcing error. Likewise, a specific highly cited Nature Medicine paper does not “have” the journal’s JIF — the metric is computed at the journal level only, never the article level — and neither does an individual author who published there, which is exactly the conflation DORA’s guidance warns against. A separate, easy mix-up worth flagging explicitly: Nature’s own JIF and Nature Communications’ JIF (18.1 for the 2025 data year, per Nature Portfolio’s own page) are each real, separately computed figures for other Nature Portfolio journals — neither is Nature Medicine’s own JIF, despite the shared publisher and shared brand name.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Nature Medicine’s current Journal Impact Factor?

Per Nature Portfolio’s own page (nature.com/nm/journal-impact), Nature Medicine’s 2-year Journal Impact Factor is 52.5, and its 5-year Impact Factor is also 52.5, both for the 2025 JCR data year (JCR release published June 2026). Clarivate updates JCR figures every June, so treat this as time-stamped to that release and verify against the publisher’s page before citing it formally. Last verified against that page: August 16, 2026.

Where should this figure be verified, and why does that matter?

Directly against Nature Medicine’s own journal-impact page at nature.com/nm/journal-impact, or against Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports (jcr.clarivate.com, institutional-subscription access). Third-party JCR-tracking aggregators and Wikipedia infoboxes frequently lag behind the current JCR release or mix up data-year and release-year labeling, which is why this page cites the publisher directly rather than a secondary source.

Is Nature Medicine’s Impact Factor the same as its CiteScore?

No. CiteScore is a separate Elsevier/Scopus metric using a four-year citation window and a broader set of source documents, unlike the JIF’s two-year window and citable-items denominator. Reporting one figure as if it were the other is a common sourcing error.

Does an individual article in Nature Medicine “have” the journal’s Impact Factor?

No. The JIF is computed at the journal level, not the article level, so a single highly cited paper does not inherit or carry the journal’s score. DORA’s guidance specifically warns against using a journal-level metric like this one as a proxy for the quality of an individual article or researcher.

Related terms

• Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the general metric this page illustrates with one journal’s current figure.
• Nature’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the flagship Nature Portfolio title’s separately computed JIF.
• Nature Communications’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — a sister Nature Portfolio title’s separately computed JIF.
• CiteScore — Elsevier/Scopus’s competing journal-level metric, different window and denominator.
• h-index — an author-level metric, not a journal-level one.
• DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) — the reform commitment behind the over-reliance caveat above.
• DORA vs CoARA — comparing the two major research-assessment reform frameworks.