Multidisciplinary Scientific Journals: Nature, Science, PNAS, and Others

A handful of journals sit at the top of the scientific publishing world and accept papers on virtually any topic — from quantum physics to epidemiology to paleoclimatology. These multidisciplinary journals — Nature, Science, PNAS, and a growing family of competitors — operate differently from discipline-specific outlets, and understanding how they work matters for anyone reading, citing, or submitting research.

Definition and scope

Multidisciplinary scientific journals publish refereed original research across two or more unrelated scientific disciplines, with the broadest titles covering the full span of natural and social sciences. The defining feature is not breadth alone — it is the editorial judgment that a paper must interest readers outside the submitting author's field. A crystallography paper in Nature is expected to carry implications that a biologist or atmospheric scientist would find meaningful. That cross-field relevance standard is more demanding than it sounds, and it explains rejection rates that routinely exceed 90 percent at the top titles.

The major players in this space are well established. Nature, published by Springer Nature, launched in 1869 and remains one of the most cited journals in all of science (Springer Nature). Science, the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), has been published continuously since 1880 (AAAS). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), published by the National Academy of Sciences, began in 1914 and publishes roughly 3,500 articles per year (PNAS). A younger but now prominent addition is PLOS ONE, launched in 2006 by the Public Library of Science, which pioneered a different editorial model discussed below (PLOS).

For a broader map of how these titles fit within the full landscape of research publishing, the Scientific Journal Authority index provides orientation across journal types, metrics, and access models.

How it works

Submission to a multidisciplinary journal triggers a two-stage filter that discipline-specific journals typically skip. First, editors — often PhD scientists working full-time at the journal rather than active researchers — conduct a desk review to assess broad significance. At Nature and Science, the majority of manuscripts are rejected at this stage, before peer review begins. Only papers judged to meet the significance threshold move to external peer reviewers.

The peer review process at these journals typically involves 2 to 3 specialist reviewers, but with an added expectation: reviewers are asked to comment on accessibility and framing, not just technical correctness. A paper that is technically sound but written only for specialists in one narrow subfield may still be returned for revision. The peer review process explained covers this mechanism in fuller detail.

PNAS has historically operated a slightly different model. Until 2010, National Academy members could "communicate" papers directly — essentially sponsoring submissions that bypassed standard review. That pathway was closed after criticism that it created inconsistent quality standards. PNAS now uses standard editorial peer review for all submissions, with a track for Direct Submission and a separate track for contributions submitted by NAS members who secure independent review.

PLOS ONE broke from the significance-first model entirely. Its editorial criterion is technical and methodological soundness only — not perceived importance or novelty. This made it, for a time, the highest-volume refereed journal in the world by article count. The tradeoff is a lower impact factor and journal metrics score relative to Nature and Science, though the model has proven influential across open-access publishing.

Common scenarios

Multidisciplinary journals attract specific types of research:

  1. Landmark findings with cross-disciplinary reach — discoveries like the announcement of gravitational wave detection (published in Physical Review Letters but immediately reported in Science and Nature news sections) or CRISPR gene-editing advances that generated original research papers in Science.
  2. Large consortium studies — genomic or epidemiological projects involving dozens of institutions, where the scope justifies a general-audience journal.
  3. Methodological breakthroughs — new techniques (imaging, sequencing, computation) whose utility spans fields.
  4. Replication or meta-analyses with broad implications — findings that challenge established results across a field attract the cross-disciplinary readership these journals serve.
  5. Policy-relevant science — climate data, pandemic modeling, and public health findings where the audience extends beyond academia.

Researchers working in narrower specialties often publish in discipline-specific journals — the top scientific journals by discipline covers those outlets — reserving multidisciplinary submissions for work they believe will genuinely travel.

Decision boundaries

Choosing between a multidisciplinary flagship and a specialized journal involves a set of concrete tradeoffs, not just prestige calculations.

Multidisciplinary flagship vs. specialized journal:

The decision also turns on where a paper's intended audience actually reads. A computational neuroscience result may land better in eLife or Nature Neuroscience than in the flagship Nature, simply because the focused disciplinary readership is more concentrated there.

References

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