I know that Nature/Science papers have become increasingly bloated over the years, but you can't even get some small but high impact work into nature communications these days. It still has to have a large scope, even more so than a manuscript in a decent journal. I'm reading a recentish polymer paper in there and it contains so much work. Like tons and tons of experiments, various biological assays, highly detailed thermal and mechanical characteristics, in lab degradation test and a field test, synthesis, processing and fabricating for various applications... The paper is actually borderline impossible to read because it's only 5 pages and 6 figures. So damn near every sentence beyond the intro references a supplemental figure or table. This seriously could've been 4-5 manuscripts in decent journals in the field. And from scrolling through it seems like the overwhelming majority of papers are like this.
I think I have something that potentially has the impact to go there, but there's no way in hell it has a chance off of novelty and impact alone of this is the amount if work needed for a communication. The weird thing is that a quick Google search says nature comms IF is 16.6, which is good but not really that crazy for my field. We have journals around there with significantly more reasonable expectations in scope.
Anyways, sorry for the rant, just an early career scientist trying to get that hit that will get me into the more prestigious journals.
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