Nature Human Behaviour

Nature Human Behaviour
Title	Nature Human Behaviour
Discipline	Multidisciplinary social and behavioural sciences
Abbreviation	Nat. Hum. Behav.
Publisher	Springer Nature
Country	United Kingdom
History	2017–present
Frequency	Monthly
Openaccess	Hybrid

Nature Human Behaviour is a peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary journal publishing empirical, theoretical, and methodological research on human behaviour. Launched in 2017 by Springer Nature, the journal aims to bridge research traditions across psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, economics, political science, and related fields. It operates within a high-profile stable of journals alongside Nature Neuroscience, Nature Communications, and Nature Medicine.

Overview

The journal issues original research articles, reviews, meta-analyses, methods papers, and commentaries that engage topics relevant to human actions in contexts such as decision-making, social interaction, cultural evolution, and collective dynamics. It positions itself in relation to legacy outlets including Science (journal), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The Lancet Psychiatry, Psychological Review, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Editorial leadership and contributors have connections with institutions such as University of Oxford, University College London, Harvard University, Stanford University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scope and Aims

The scope encompasses empirical studies using experimental, observational, longitudinal, computational, and cross-cultural methods. The aims include promoting reproducible practices championed by projects like the Open Science Framework, encouraging preregistration as advocated by the Reproducibility Project: Psychology, and fostering interdisciplinary dialogue akin to collaborations between researchers from London School of Economics, Yale University, Columbia University, Princeton University, University of Cambridge, University of Chicago, New York University, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Michigan. The journal solicits work intersecting with policy-relevant arenas that attract attention from bodies such as the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and national agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Economic and Social Research Council.

Publication and Editorial Process

Manuscripts submitted undergo editorial triage followed by peer review managed by in-house editors and external academic editors affiliated with universities and research institutes such as Australian National University, McGill University, Peking University, National University of Singapore, University of Tokyo, Seoul National University, ETH Zurich, and Max Planck Society. The process mirrors standards observed at journals like Cell, The BMJ, Nature, and PNAS, emphasizing transparency, statistical rigour, and data availability. Editorial policies reference community initiatives including the Committee on Publication Ethics, the Equator Network, and principles articulated by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.

Impact and Reception

Since its inception the journal has attracted high-impact articles that receive citation attention in outlets such as Nature, Science Advances, American Journal of Sociology, American Political Science Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Neuron, Annual Review of Psychology, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences. The journal's reception has been discussed in media outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, BBC News, Financial Times, The Economist, Nature News, and Science Magazine. Debates over methodological standards have linked it to controversies and reforms seen in the wake of the Reproducibility Project: Psychology and commentaries by figures associated with the Center for Open Science and initiatives at the National Academy of Sciences.

Notable Research and Special Issues

Published works have covered topics such as cognitive bias research that intersects with literature from Daniel Kahneman-associated traditions, behavioural economics threads connected to Richard Thaler-style nudging, cultural evolution studies resonant with scholars like Joseph Henrich, and social network analyses building on methods used in research by Duncan Watts and Albert-László Barabási. Special collections and themed issues have addressed pandemics and public health behaviour drawing on expertise from World Health Organization-related research, crisis communication studies informed by reports from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and computational social science pieces aligned with conferences like The Web Conference and ICWSM. High-profile articles have involved collaborations with researchers from CERN-adjacent data science initiatives, fieldwork connected to the Human Relations Area Files, and comparative studies involving datasets curated by the World Values Survey, European Social Survey, General Social Survey, and Demographic and Health Surveys.

Indexing and Abstracting

The journal is indexed and abstracted in major bibliographic databases and indices alongside comparable titles such as Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed Central, PsycINFO, EconLit, RePEc, SSRN, and Google Scholar. Institutional subscriptions and article-level metrics are tracked in platforms maintained by organizations like CrossRef, Clarivate Analytics, Altmetric, and ORCID integrations that link authors from research hubs including Imperial College London, Karolinska Institutet, Johns Hopkins University, Brown University, Duke University, University of Toronto, University of British Columbia, Monash University, University of Sydney, and University of Amsterdam.

Category:Academic journals