About the journal
The ISME Journal is the flagship publishing venue for the International Society for Microbial Ecology. The fully open access journal covers the diverse and integrated areas of microbial ecology.
Aims and Scope
The ISME Journal covers the diverse and integrated areas of microbial ecology. We encourage contributions that represent major advances for the study of microbial ecosystems, communities, and interactions of microorganisms in the environment.
Articles in The ISME Journal describe pioneering discoveries of wide appeal that enhance our understanding of functional and mechanistic relationships among microorganisms, their communities, and their habitats.
The broad scope of The ISME Journal encompasses the full breadth of microbial ecology research, exploring topics that include (but are not limited to):
- Climate change microbiology
- Microbial contributions to biogeochemical cycles
- Community assembly
- Engineered and synthetic microbial communities
- Host-microbiome interactions
- Microbiomes of engineered environments
- Modeling and ecological theory
- Novel microorganisms and metabolic functions
- Spatial and temporal dynamics
The ISME Journal welcomes a range of content types including original research, reviews, brief communications, and perspective articles of the highest significance for the microbial ecology research community.
Move to fully Open Access
Read the FAQs to learn more about The ISME Journal's move to fully open access in 2024.
The ISME Journal versus ISME Communications
The journals are similar with respect to subject matter but different with respect to level of advance. The ISME Journal selects discoveries that merit the attention of all microbial ecologists, whereas ISME Communications is an appropriate venue for the majority of research from our laboratories that is of high quality yet of somewhat narrower scope and impact on the field than would be appropriate for The ISME Journal.
Although The ISME Journal will consider methodological and computational studies, they must be “game changers” for microbial ecologists, leading to a fundamental shift in techniques adopted by the discipline or presenting a major discovery because of the new technique. Given the relative rarity of such groundbreaking methods papers, most methods-oriented manuscripts should be submitted directly to ISME Communications.
The following studies will be considered out of scope:
- Focus inappropriate (e.g., only relevant to lab culture conditions, or primarily emphasizing animal or plant processes).
- Limited advance (e.g., the study is incremental, confirmatory of prior knowledge).
- Preliminary (e.g., observations do not lead to conclusions that are sufficiently supported, or insufficient replication)
- Descriptive (e.g., lack of hypothesis, or focusing only on amplicons, MAGs, or data meta-analyses).
Why Publish in The ISME Journal?
- We are an official journal of the International Society of Microbial Ecology.
- Ranked amongst the top 10 journals worldwide in Ecology and Microbiology, we promote diverse and integrated areas of microbial ecology, spanning the breadth of microbial life.
- We encourage contributions of broad ecological interest and impact.
- We provide wide exposure and high visibility for your publication through our OUP academic platform.
- We are fully open access, which increases the visibility of your research and creates more opportunities for fellow researchers to read, share, cite, and build upon your findings.
- World's leading voices in the field form our expert editorial team, providing attractive turnaround times from first decision to publication.
Journal Metrics
Article metrics such as number of downloads, citations and online attention are available from each article page, and provide an overview of the attention received by a paper.
2023 Citation Metrics
Impact Factor*: 10.8
5-year Impact Factor*: 11.8
*2023 Journal Citation Reports® Science Edition (Clarivate Analytics, 2024)
2022 Citation Metrics
2-year Impact Factor*: 11.0
5-year Impact Factor*: 12.3
Immediacy index*: 2.1
Eigenfactor® score*: 0.04001
Article influence score*: 3.3
Journal Citation Indicator*: 2.56
SNIP**: 2.624
SJR***: 3.619
*2022 Journal Citation Reports® Science Edition (Clarivate Analytics, 2023)
**Source-normalized Impact per Paper (Scopus)
***SCImago Journal Rank (Scopus)
Abstracted/indexed in:
BIOSIS
Medline
Google Scholar
OCLC
Science Citation Index
Science Citation Index Expanded (SciSearch)
Current Contents/ Agriculture, Biology & Environmental Sciences
Current Contents/ Life Sciences
EBSCO Discovery Service
SCOPUS
Summon by ProQuest
EBSCO Academic Search
PubMedCentral
EBCO Engineering Source
EBSCO Environment Complete
EBSCO STM Source
EBSCO Environment Index
EBSCO TOC Premier
Newsfeeds
The ISME Journal now provides its latest table of contents as an RSS web feed. This allows users with an RSS reader to receive automatic updates whenever new content is added to these pages.
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