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 — treat as time-stamped, not fixed

Multiple independent JCR-tracking aggregators report Nature Medicine’s 2-year Impact Factor at approximately 79.6 for the most recent JCR release, with a 5-year Impact Factor around 82, placing it among the highest-scoring primary research journals in medicine. Aggregators also report a decline from a pandemic-era peak of roughly 87.2 two releases prior, consistent with the same COVID-19 citation surge aging out of the two-year window that affected Nature’s own figure. Nature Medicine’s own journal-information page on nature.com was not directly reachable during verification (redirected behind an author/subscriber login), so treat this specific number as reported and cross-corroborated by secondary JCR-tracking sources rather than independently confirmed against Clarivate or Nature’s own primary page — check jcr.clarivate.com or nature.com/nm/journal-information for the authoritative current figure before citing it formally. As with every JCR-indexed title, Clarivate updates this figure every June, so any specific number, including this one, is a property of a given release, not a fixed property of the journal.

Worked example

If Nature Medicine published roughly 200 citable items across two preceding years, and those items collectively received about 15,900 citations in the JCR data year, the resulting JIF would be 15,900 / 200 ≈ 79.5 — 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 (currently in the mid-fifties) and Nature Communications’ JIF (currently in the mid-teens) 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.

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.