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Natural Product Reports is a Transformative Journal and Plan S compliant
Impact factor: 10.2*
Time to first decision (all decisions): 42.0 days**
Time to first decision (peer reviewed only): 42.5 days***
Chair: Tobias Gulder
Indexed in MEDLINE
CiteScore: 21.2****
Open access publishing options available
Journal scope
Natural Product Reports (NPR) is a critical review journal that stimulates progress in all areas of natural products research, including isolation, structural and stereochemical determination, biosynthesis, biological activity and synthesis.
The scope of the journal is very broad, and many reviews discuss the role of natural products in the wider bioinorganic, bioorganic and chemical biology communities. Areas covered include the following:
- Enzymology
- Nucleic acids
- Genetics
- Chemical ecology
- Carbohydrates
- Primary and secondary metabolism
- Analytical techniques
NPR articles are designed to give an interesting insight into the topic, focusing on the key developments that have shaped a field. Authors are encouraged to include their own perspective on developments, trends and future directions. Articles providing a very comprehensive overview or exhaustive list of previous literature and lacking critical insight are generally not suitable for publication in NPR.
Meta-analyses of previously published data using existing tools can be included, however NPR articles should not include any new methods or data.
Natural Product Reports Lectureship
This Lectureship recognises an outstanding emerging investigator who has made a significant contribution to a natural products-related area of the chemical sciences, providing a platform to showcase their research to the wider scientific community. The NPR Lectureship is awarded annually through a process whereby nominations of candidates are invited from our community.
You can read about eligibility, how to nominate, see deadlines and all of the winners.
Find out more
Meet the team
Find out who is on the editorial and advisory boards for the Natural Product Reports journal.
Chair
Tobias Gulder, Technical University of Dresden and Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland, Germany
Editorial board members
Heike Brötz-Oesterhelt, University of Tübingen, Germany
Nadja Cech, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA
Alessandra Eustaquio, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Roger Linington, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Dong-Chan Oh, Seoul National University, South Korea
Cassandra Quave, Emory University, USA
Margherita Sosio, Naicons Srl, Milan, Italy
Eriko Takano, University of Manchester, UK
Hidetoshi Tokuyama, Tohoku University, Japan
Christopher Vanderwal, University of California, Irvine, USA
Changsheng Zhang, South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, China Academy of Sciences, China
Giovanni Appendino, Universita del Piemonte Orientale, Italy
Roberto Berlinck, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
Carole Bewley, National Institutes of Health, USA
Christopher Boddy, University of Ottawa, Canada
Robert Britton, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Margaret A Brimble, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Mark Brönstrup, Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Germany
Guy Carter, Carter-Bernan Consulting, USA
Russell Cox, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany
Pieter Dorrestein, University of California, San Diego, USA
Katherine Duncan, University of Strathclyde, UK
Neha Garg, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Susana P. Gaudêncio, Nova University Lisbon, Portugal
Olga Genilloud, Fundación MEDINA, Spain
Rebecca Goss, St. Andrews University, UK
Seth Herzon, Yale University, USA
Chambers Hughes, University of Tübingen, Germany
Marcel Jaspars, University of Aberdeen, UK
Martin Kaltenpoth, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Germany
Andreas Kirschning, University of Hannover, Germany
Julia Kubanek, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Wen Liu, Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, China
Sandra Loesgen, University of Florida, USA
Hendrik Luesch, University of Florida, USA
Dawei Ma, Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, China
Marnix Medema, Wageningen University, Netherlands
Fidele Ntie-Kang, University of Buea, Cameroon
Sarah O'Connor, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena, Germany
Jörn Piel, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Jürgen Rohr, University of Kentucky, USA
Martin Schmeing, McGill University, Canada
Stefan Schulz, TU Braunschweig, Germany
Michael Sherburn, Australia National University, Australia
Thomas J Simpson, University of Bristol, UK
Janet Smith, University of Michigan, USA
Renxiang Tan, Nanjing University, China
Dirk Trauner, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Reiko Ueoka, Kitasato Universit, Japan
Justin Van der Hooft, Wageningen University, Netherlands
Kira Weissman, Lorraine University, France
Craig Williams, The University of Queensland, Australia
Zhen Yang, Peking University, China
Yeo Joon Yoon, Seoul National University, Korea
Weidong Zhang, Second Military Medical University, Shanghai, China
Katie Lim, Executive Editor
Grace Thoburn, Deputy Editor
Daniel Robertshaw, Development Editor
Sarah Anthony, Editorial Production Manager
Nicola Burton, Publishing Editor
Tom Cozens, Publishing Editor
Ryan Kean, Publishing Editor
Roxane Owen, Publishing Editor, ORCID 0000-0002-4553-233X
Andrea Whiteside, Publishing Assistant
Sam Keltie, Publisher, Journals, ORCID 0000-0002-9369-8414
Transparent peer review
As part of our commitment to transparency and open science, Natural Product Reports is now offering authors the option of transparent peer review, where the editor’s decision letter, reviewers’ comments and authors’ response for all versions of the manuscript will be published alongside the article under an Open Access Creative Commons licence (CC-BY). Please note comments and decisions on synopses will not be published.
Reviewers will remain anonymous unless they choose to sign their report.
Journal specific guidelines
Guidelines on writing titles, abstracts & table of contents entry
The title, abstract and table of contents entry (graphical abstract) are the first parts of your manuscript that editors, referees and potential readers will see, and once published they play a major part in a researcher’s decision to read your article. Therefore it’s important that these clearly and concisely summarise the topic of your review and its significance.
Title
The title should be short and straightforward to appeal to a general reader, but detailed enough to properly reflect the contents of your review article.
- Keep it relatively short – between 8 and 15 words is ideal.
- Use easily recognisable words and phrases that can be read quickly.
- Use general or well-known terms for compounds and procedures rather than very specialised terms or nomenclature.
- Avoid using non-standard abbreviations and symbols.
- Use keywords and familiar, searchable terms – these can increase the chances of your article appearing in search results. Around 70% of our readers come directly via search engines.
Abstract
The abstract is a single paragraph which summarises the contents of your article. It will help readers to decide whether your article is of interest to them.
- The length can vary from 50 to 250 words (or up to 100 words for Highlight articles), but it should always be concise and easy to read with recognisable words and phrases.
- It should summarise the research area that your review covers, including why it is important.
- Like your title, make sure you use familiar, searchable terms and keywords.
Table of contents entry
A table of contents entry (graphical abstract) is required, which should be submitted at the revision stage. This should include an eye-catching graphic and 1-2 sentence(s) of text to summarise the key findings of the article to the reader. It will appear in the table of contents and feeds – for example, RSS feeds.
The graphic should:
- Be simple, but informative.
- Capture the reader’s attention (the use of colour is encouraged).
- Include a structure, scheme, graph, drawing, photograph or combination that conveys the message of the article. Please note, complex schematics or spectra should be avoided.
- Be original, unpublished artwork created by one of the co-authors. Preferably, the graphic should not be reused and appear again within the article.
- Be suitable for, and uphold the standards of, a scholarly publication that has a global reach.
- Not contain any elements that are offensive or inappropriate, in particular words or images that are discriminatory.
- Not contain large amounts of text. Text should be limited to the labelling of compounds, reaction arrows and diagrams, with long phrases or sentences being avoided. Any text should be clearly legible to a reader.
- Not contain logos, trademarks or brands names.
The text should:
- Be concise and focus only on the key findings of the manuscript and their importance, not the processes used; think about what would grab the attention of the potential reader and would encourage them to read the full article.
- Avoid repeating or paraphrasing the title or abstract.
- Use easily recognisable words and phrases that can be read quickly.
Table of contents specifications:
- The figure should be a maximum size of 8 cm wide x 4 cm high.
- Figures should be supplied as TIFF files, with a resolution of 600 dpi or greater.
- The text supplied should be 1-2 sentences long, using a maximum of 250 characters.
Titles
Chemical proteomics approaches for identifying the cellular targets of natural products
From DOI: 10.1039/C6NP00001K
Dereplication, sequencing and identification of peptidic natural products: from genome mining to peptidogenomics to spectral networks
From DOI: 10.1039/C5NP00050E
A twist of nature – the significance of atropisomers in biological systems
From DOI: 10.1039/C4NP00121D
Abstracts
This highlight provides an overview of recent progress towards elucidating the structure, biosynthesis, and mode of action of colibactin, a genotoxic secondary metabolite synthesized by human gut bacteria. While isolating colibactin has been problematic, efforts to characterize its biosynthesis have provided critical information that has led to a rapid increase in our knowledge of this metabolite's structure and function. Major questions and gaps remain however, and the broader lessons learned from studying colibactin underscore central challenges to be faced in the genomics era of natural product research and in efforts to understand the human microbiome.
From DOI: 10.1039/C5NP00091B
Deconvoluting the mode of action of natural products and drugs remains one of the biggest challenges in chemistry and biology today. Chemical proteomics is a growing area of chemical biology that seeks to design small molecule probes to understand protein function. In the context of natural products, chemical proteomics can be used to identify the protein binding partners or targets of small molecules in live cells. Here, we highlight recent examples of chemical probes based on natural products and their application for target identification. The review focuses on probes that can be covalently linked to their target proteins (either via intrinsic chemical reactivity or via the introduction of photocrosslinkers), and can be applied “in situ” – in living systems rather than cell lysates. We also focus here on strategies that employ a click reaction, the copper-catalysed azide–alkyne cycloaddition reaction (CuAAC), to allow minimal functionalisation of natural product scaffolds with an alkyne or azide tag. We also discuss ‘competitive mode’ approaches that screen for natural products that compete with a well-characterised chemical probe for binding to a particular set of protein targets. Fuelled by advances in mass spectrometry instrumentation and bioinformatics, many modern strategies are now embracing quantitative proteomics to help define the true interacting partners of probes, and we highlight the opportunities this rapidly evolving technology provides in chemical proteomics. Finally, some of the limitations and hallenges of chemical proteomics approaches are discussed.
From DOI: 10.1039/C6NP00001K
While recent breakthroughs in the discovery of peptide antibiotics and other Peptidic Natural Products (PNPs) raise a challenge for developing new algorithms for their analyses, the computational technologies for high-throughput PNP discovery are still lacking. We discuss the computational bottlenecks in analyzing PNPs and review recent advances in genome mining, peptidogenomics, and spectral networks that are now enabling the discovery of new PNPs via mass spectrometry. We further describe the connections between these advances and the new generation of software tools for PNP dereplication, de novo sequencing, and identification.
From DOI: 10.1039/C5NP00050E
Table of contents
In this Viewpoint article we examine the roles of bacterially produced small molecules in animal defense, development and evolution.
From DOI: 10.1039/C4NP00141A
This highlight reviews recent studies of colibactin, a structurally uncharacterized genotoxin synthesised by members of the human gut microbiota.
From DOI: 10.1039/C5NP00091B
This highlight focuses on one of Nature's key strategies to doubly modify an amino acid during nonribosomal peptide biosynthesis by using a single enzyme, an interrupted adenylation domain.
From DOI: 10.1039/C4NP00120F
Open access publishing options
Natural Product Reports is a hybrid (transformative) journal and gives authors the choice of publishing their research either via the traditional subscription-based model or instead by choosing our gold open access option. Find out more about our Transformative Journals. which are Plan S compliant.
Gold open access
For authors who want to publish their article gold open access, Natural Product Reports charges an article processing charge (APC) of £2,500 (+ any applicable tax). Our APC is all-inclusive and makes your article freely available online immediately, permanently, and includes your choice of Creative Commons licence (CC BY or CC BY-NC) at no extra cost. It is not a submission charge, so you only pay if your article is accepted for publication.
Learn more about publishing open access.
Read & Publish
If your institution has a Read & Publish agreement in place with the Royal Society of Chemistry, APCs for gold open access publishing in Natural Product Reports may already be covered.
Use our journal finder to check if your institution has an open access agreement with us.
Please use your official institutional email address to submit your manuscript and check you are assigned as the corresponding author; this helps us to identify if you are eligible for Read & Publish or other APC discounts.
Traditional subscription model
Authors can also publish in Natural Product Reports via the traditional subscription model without needing to pay an APC. Articles published via this route are available to institutions and individuals who subscribe to the journal. Our standard licence allows you to make the accepted manuscript of your article freely available after a 12-month embargo period. This is known as the green route to open access.
Readership information
Academic and industrial scientists working in all areas of natural products research and wider topics including chemical biology, organic synthesis, pharmacology and analytical chemistry.
Subscription information
Natural Product Reports is part of the collection RSC Gold subscription package.
Online only 2025: ISSN 1460-4752, £1,379 / $2,426
*2023 Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate Analytics, 2024)
**The median time from submission to first decision including manuscripts rejected without peer review from the previous calendar year
***The median time from submission to first decision for peer-reviewed manuscripts from the previous calendar year
****CiteScore™ 2023 available at www.scopus.com/sources
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