Natural Product Reports journal

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Impact factor: 10.2*

Time to first decision (all decisions): 43.5 days**

Time to first decision (peer reviewed only): 43.5 days***

Chair: Tobias Gulder

Indexed in Web of Science, Scopus and MEDLINE

CiteScore: 21.2****

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Meet the team

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

Alessandra Eustaquio, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Neha Garg, Georgia Institute of Technology, 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

Tilmann Weber, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark

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

Nadja Cech, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA

Russell Cox, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany

Pieter Dorrestein, University of California, San Diego, USA

Katherine Duncan, Newcastle University, 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

Christopher Vanderwal, University of California, Irvine, USA

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

Article types

Natural Product Reports publishes:

Reviews
Highlights
Viewpoints
Hot off the press articles

NPR articles are generally solicited by members of the Editorial Board, however we welcome proposals from the research community. If you are interested in writing an article for NPR, please contact the Editorial Office with a brief synopsis.

Synopses for all proposed articles are considered by the board before a decision on the commissioning of the full article is taken.

How to submit a synopsis to NPR

See more information about these article types

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.

Find out more about our transparent peer review policy

Journal specific guidelines

The following guidelines are journal specific. For general guidance on preparing an article please visit our Prepare your article and Resources for authors pages, the content of which is relevant to all of our journals.

See more 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.

Examples of suitable titles, abstracts and table of contents information

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

Open access publishing options

Natural Product Reports is a hybrid 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.

Gold open access

For authors who want to publish their article gold open access, Natural Product Reports charges an article processing charge (APC) of £3000 (+ 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.

Open access agreements

If your institution has an RSC open access agreement or APCs for gold open access, publishing in this journal 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 under an open access agreement 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.

Learn more about green 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

What would you like to know about this journal?

Journal scope

Natural Product Reports Lectureship