Cell Death & Disease Impact Factor and Metrics: Comparing the CDDpress Journals

If you have searched "Cell Death and Disease impact factor" and come away uncertain, the confusion is understandable. Three journals in the CDDpress family share a publisher, a thematic focus, and names that sound nearly identical at first pass. Each holds a Q1 ranking, each is indexed in PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus, and each sits on the journal shortlists of anyone working in cell death biology, cancer mechanisms, or autophagy. But the practical differences between them, measured in review time, article volume, H-index depth, and open access fees, are large enough to matter for a submission decision.

This post compares the three journals side by side using the 2026 data from Journal Metrics Score (the site's metric derived from OpenAlex citation data) and the additional submission-relevant figures available for each title. For the traditional Clarivate Journal Citation Reports Impact Factor for each journal, the individual journal pages on this site carry that figure separately. The two metrics use similar underlying logic but draw on different citation databases, so they will not match exactly.

The Three Journals at a Glance

Before going into each journal in depth, the comparison table below puts the key submission-relevant figures together. The Journal Metrics Score (JMS) is the site's 2026 figure based on OpenAlex data. Review speed is the median days to first decision based on reported submission timing data. All APCs are in USD for gold open access publication.

The table immediately raises an interesting question: why does the youngest journal in the family, Cell Death Discovery (founded in 2015), carry the highest Journal Metrics Score (10.4), while the founding journal, Cell Death & Differentiation (founded in 1994), sits below both siblings at 9.4? The answer is almost entirely about what subfields each journal has been covering and how citation patterns in those subfields have shifted in recent years.

Cell Death & Differentiation: Prestige, Selectivity, and the Long Queue

Cell Death & Differentiation launched in 1994 under Nature Publishing Group and has built one of the strongest citation records in its subject area over three decades. Its H-index of 313 reflects that depth: a journal accumulates an H-index by producing hundreds of papers that each clear the citation threshold individually. Getting to 313 requires sustained quality at volume across many years. For perspective, the other two journals in the family, which are younger and have published fewer total works, have H-indices of 237 and 106 respectively.

The prestige carries editorial consequences. Cell Death & Differentiation publishes selectively. Annual output has run around 180 to 210 original articles in recent years, which is modest for a Springer Nature open access-capable journal. The selectivity is intentional: the editors are looking for mechanistic advances rather than incremental characterization studies, and the reviewer pool is drawn from senior researchers who apply corresponding standards. Papers on apoptosis, necroptosis, pyroptosis, autophagy, or ferroptosis that offer clear pathway-level insights demonstrated in multiple model systems are strong candidates. Papers that follow an established mechanistic template with a new gene or tumor type, without a genuine conceptual step forward, face a harder road.

The median review time of 225 days, with the middle 50% of submissions taking between 172 and 281 days, is the longest of the three. That is a significant wait, and it matters differently depending on where you are in your career. For a senior investigator building on a sustained body of work, three to four months in review at a top journal is unremarkable. For a postdoctoral researcher needing a first-author publication before a fellowship deadline, or a junior faculty member approaching a tenure clock, the timeline is a meaningful cost.

The journal operates as a hybrid open access title. Authors can publish under a traditional subscription model, in which case the article sits behind a paywall for readers without institutional access, or they can pay the APC of $5,290 to make the article openly available. If your funder requires open access immediately upon publication, as UKRI and many European Research Council grants do, check the specific terms before submitting, since hybrid journals can have different compliance pathways for different funder mandates.

Cell Death & Disease: High Volume, Open Access, and What That Means for Your Paper

Cell Death & Disease launched in 2010 as a fully open access companion to Differentiation. It is now the largest journal in the family by a considerable margin: total publications have passed 12,000, and annual output has run close to a thousand papers per year. That volume is the defining fact about the journal for anyone trying to understand what it accepts and why its metrics look the way they do.

The H-index of 237, strong for a journal founded in 2010, and the total citation count of over 600,000 reflect the compounding effect of publishing many papers in active research areas over fifteen years. High-volume journals in fields with heavy citation activity accumulate citation mass at scale, and citation-based metrics respond to that. The Journal Metrics Score of 8.6 sits below Cell Death Discovery (10.4) despite Disease's much larger citation base, because the score is calculated per paper rather than as a total, and the average paper in Disease has been cited somewhat less intensively than the average paper in Discovery in the most recent citation windows.

The median review time of 209 days (interquartile range 157 to 266 days) is marginally faster than Differentiation. The difference is not large enough to make timeline the primary factor separating the two journals, but it is consistent. The APC of $4,490 is $800 lower than Differentiation, and the fully open access model simplifies funder compliance: every paper is immediately open upon publication without any further author action required.

Cell Death Discovery: Fastest Review, Lowest APC, and the Citation Surge

Cell Death Discovery launched in 2015 as the third and youngest journal in the CDDpress family. It is fully open access and has grown quickly, publishing around 500 to 620 papers per year in recent years. The combination of a high Journal Metrics Score (10.4, the highest in the family), the fastest median review time (137 days), and the lowest APC ($2,390) makes it a genuinely attractive option for authors who follow the metrics carefully.

The high Journal Metrics Score relative to the older journals is worth understanding, because it is not what you would expect from the youngest title with the lowest H-index (106). The explanation lies in which topics Discovery has been publishing most heavily and when. The journal has concentrated substantially on ferroptosis, RNA modifications and their links to cancer progression, and autophagy-related mechanisms. These areas have been among the most heavily cited in cell biology through 2022 to 2025. A journal that published substantial output in ferroptosis during the period when that field was generating citation bursts will show high per-paper citation rates, which drives citation-based scores upward even if the absolute citation count is lower than older journals.

The H-index of 106, while lower than the other two journals, is appropriate context rather than a mark against the journal. Citation histories build over decades, not years. A journal that has been publishing for ten years cannot accumulate the same citation depth as one that has been running since 1994 regardless of how good its recent papers are. Authors who use H-index as their primary metric will find Discovery looks weaker than Differentiation on that number. Authors who follow recent citation activity in their specific subfields may find the opposite.

The review timeline is the most practically useful distinguishing feature for many authors. A median of 137 days, with the middle half of decisions coming between 102 and 179 days, means authors typically get a first decision in about four to five months. That is nearly three months faster than Cell Death & Differentiation and about two and a half months faster than Disease. For authors who need to move quickly, that difference is not trivial.

Understanding the Journal Metrics Score vs. the JCR Impact Factor

Authors searching for "Cell Death and Disease impact factor" are typically looking for the Clarivate Journal Citation Reports figure, which remains the most commonly cited number in institutional rankings, grant applications, and promotion dossiers. The Journal Metrics Score presented on this site and in the table above is a different figure, computed from OpenAlex citation data rather than from the JCR.

Both metrics count citations to recent papers per paper published and express the result as a ratio, which is the underlying logic of all impact factor variants. The differences are in which citations are counted (OpenAlex covers a broader set of sources than Clarivate's curated list), the exact calculation window, and how each handles self-citations and document type filtering. The two numbers will not match, but they tend to move together and tell a consistent story about relative journal position. The JCR Impact Factor for each CDDpress journal is listed on the individual journal pages for Cell Death & Differentiation, Cell Death & Disease, and Cell Death Discovery on this site.

When you are completing a promotion dossier or a grant section that asks for impact factor, use the JCR figure. When you are comparing journals as a researcher deciding where to submit, the Journal Metrics Score, APC, review speed, and scope fit are at least as informative as the JCR number alone.

The Open Access and APC Landscape

Two of the three journals (Disease and Discovery) are fully gold open access, meaning every paper is immediately freely available without a subscription. Cell Death & Differentiation operates as a hybrid journal: authors can publish under the traditional subscription model or pay the APC to make their article open. For most authors in 2026, full gold OA is preferable both for visibility and for compliance with funder mandates, which means Disease and Discovery have a structural advantage for authors from institutions or grant programs requiring immediate open access.

Before assuming you must pay the full APC from your research budget, check for institutional transformative agreements. Springer Nature has agreements with hundreds of institutions worldwide through its Springer Compact and equivalent programs, and researchers at covered institutions can publish in any of the CDDpress journals without additional APC payments above their institutional agreement. Your library's research support team or the Springer Nature institutional author portal will show whether your institution is covered and for which journals. This applies to all three journals in the family.

If you are paying out of pocket or from a grant with a capped APC budget, the $2,390 APC at Discovery is the practical entry point into the CDDpress family. Some major funders, including certain Wellcome Trust and Gates Foundation grants, set specific APC caps. Confirm that the journal you plan to submit to falls within your grant's specific APC ceiling before you start formatting.

Choosing the Right Journal for Your Paper

The practical decision usually comes down to three questions, none of which is the metrics comparison alone.

First, what is the genuine novelty of the work? If your paper establishes a new mechanism, identifies a previously unknown regulatory node in a cell death pathway, or resolves a contested question in the field with clean genetic evidence, Cell Death & Differentiation deserves a first look. If the work is technically solid and scientifically coherent but situates a known mechanism in a new disease context or uses a new tumor type without changing what the field understands about the pathway, Disease is the more natural fit. If you are working in a fast-moving subfield like ferroptosis, cuproptosis, or RNA-regulated cell death and want rapid publication with a strong recent citation trajectory behind the journal, Discovery is worth prioritizing.

Second, what are your timeline and budget constraints? The 88-day difference in median review time between Discovery and Differentiation is close to three months. Over the course of a job search, a grant renewal, or a fellowship assessment, three months is not trivial. If Discovery's scope genuinely fits your paper, the faster decision cycle is a real advantage. The APC difference of nearly $2,900 between Discovery and Differentiation also matters in contexts where the author or their group carries the cost.

Third, who reads the journal? The three CDDpress titles serve overlapping but distinct readerships. Differentiation reaches researchers who follow the mechanistic cell death literature at the frontier. Disease, with its broad scope and high publication volume, reaches a wider audience across oncology and translational biology. Discovery has been building a strong following in the subfields it covers most heavily. If your goal is to change how a specific research community thinks about a pathway, submitting to the journal that community already reads matters as much as the metrics.

Practical Steps Before You Submit

Read the current Instructions for Authors directly on the journal's Nature.com page before you start formatting. The CDDpress journals update their requirements periodically, and Springer Nature revised its AI disclosure requirements across its portfolio through 2026 following the retraction of papers with undisclosed AI-generated content. Confirm that your cover letter, conflict of interest statement, data availability statement, and AI use declaration each meet the specific current requirements of the journal you are targeting.

Check your institution's transformative agreement status with Springer Nature before finalizing your submission, particularly if the APC would otherwise come from discretionary funds. This is worth confirming at the time of submission rather than assuming coverage from a previous year, since agreement terms change annually.

Search the journal's recent issues for papers in your specific subfield before submitting. All three CDDpress journals are published on Nature.com, which allows date-filtered searches by keyword. A journal that has published ten papers on your precise topic in the past two years has an editorial board and reviewer pool that knows the area. One that has not published in your area recently may lack appropriate reviewers, which increases the risk of a desk rejection citing scope mismatch rather than substantive problems with the work.

If you have a preprint on bioRxiv or medRxiv, check that the journal's current policy permits posting. All three CDDpress journals accept submissions with linked preprints, but confirm the specific posting and update requirements in the current Instructions for Authors before you submit, since the details of when the preprint should be updated with the published DOI vary across titles.

Further Reading