Use when choosing among Nature, Nature Methods, or Nature Biotechnology, or when preparing a Nature Portfolio life-science manuscript for venue fit, article-type framing, and policy-aware pre-submission checks.
Use this skill when the venue decision itself is still live, or when a manuscript already targets Nature, Nature Methods, or Nature Biotechnology and needs venue-specific framing before a heavy revision pass.
This skill is about fit and policy. It does not replace scientific-writing, manuscript-optimizer, or submission-audit.
Use this skill when:
Nature, Nature Methods, or Nature BiotechnologyNature-style tone but the actual venue is undecidedArticle, Resource, Analysis, or short-format methods reportDo not use this skill when:
manuscript-optimizer firstNatureDefault to Nature only when the paper makes a broad conceptual advance that matters outside the immediate specialty and can be explained to non-specialists without heavy field-specific scaffolding.
Use these framing defaults:
Nature MethodsPrefer Nature Methods when the central contribution is a method, assay, platform, computational approach, or resource whose main claim is enabling power.
Before calling a story Nature Methods-fit, check that the manuscript can support all of these:
Nature BiotechnologyPrefer Nature Biotechnology when the paper's value is not just technical novelty but biotechnology significance: enabling capability, translational relevance, engineering depth, platform utility, or community-scale resource value.
Before calling a story Nature Biotechnology-fit, check that the manuscript can make legible:
Article or would be better framed as a ResourceDo this early. Do not treat article type as formatting cleanup.
Article: full research story with multiple linked claims and a substantial evidence chainResource: community-useful dataset, platform, atlas, database, or screening asset whose lasting value is broad reuseAnalysis: integrative or comparative analytical study when the core contribution is the analytical insight rather than a new experimental methodIf the manuscript keeps oscillating between method paper and resource paper, resolve that before rewriting the abstract or Results.
Run this before calling a draft submission-ready:
Use this decision order:
Keep these Nature Portfolio pages as the primary references:
Nature formatting guideNature editorial criteria and processesNature Methods aims, content, and editorial-policies pagesNature Biotechnology aims, content, and editorial-policies pages