Applied Sciences Review Time

The official MDPI journal page and stats page are direct: Applied Sciences is a broad applied-natural-sciences journal, it is open access, and it offers a quick first decision. SciRev has far less volume here, but the current community page still shows about 2.7 months for a first review round and 2.7 months total handling time for the lone accepted case in the public record. That is a useful reminder that a fast first decision does not mean the whole process stays equally short.

What those pages do not tell you is whether speed is the right reason to submit. That depends on the manuscript's strategic fit:

• is the paper broad enough for a multidisciplinary applied venue?
• is the contribution clearly practical, not only technically interesting?
• is the MDPI journal signal acceptable for the audience and career context that matter?

That is why timing is only one layer of the decision.

The important distinction is that the journal can be fast without making the full process trivial.

Broad-scope journals can sort quickly when they know what they want. Applied Sciences wants work that is:

• genuinely applied
• legible beyond one tiny technical niche
• complete enough to review without basic structural repair

That lets editors make early decisions on papers that are:

• too theoretical
• too narrow
• too weakly validated for the applied claim
• better suited to a field-specific engineering or materials journal

So the fast first-decision signal often reflects journal-shape clarity more than scientific certainty.

The slower papers are often the ones that are acceptable in principle but not clearly positioned.

That usually means:

• reviewer disagreement about whether the paper is broad enough
• applied framing that sounds stronger in the abstract than in the validation
• insufficient real-world conditions, cost logic, or operational testing
• a manuscript that is technically competent but not obviously stronger than better specialist alternatives

When this journal gets slower, the problem is often scope quality, not only reviewer speed.

Applied Sciences was flat year over year at 2.5 in both 2023 and 2024, after rising across the prior years from 1.8 in 2017 to 2.5 in 2024. The 2.7 five-year IF and 5.5 CiteScore show that the journal has real scale and steady visibility, but not the citation concentration of a stronger field journal. That is one reason the journal can remain broad and fast: its value proposition is operational efficiency and breadth, not extreme editorial selectivity.

The timing numbers hide several practical realities:

• fast first decision does not mean high certainty of acceptance
• large-scope journals often expose scope mismatch quickly
• fast publication after acceptance says little about how many rounds it takes to get there
• a paper can fit the workflow and still be the wrong strategic journal

So timing is useful, but it is not enough.

In our pre-submission review work, the most common timing mistake is submitting because the journal is broad and quick rather than because it is the right audience. Applied Sciences moves fastest when the application case is obvious and the paper can survive a broad reviewer pool. It becomes slower when the manuscript needs specialist context the journal is not really organized around.

The papers that move better usually look like complete applied studies from the first page, not narrow technical papers trying to borrow a broader applied label.

For Applied Sciences, the first question is not "how fast is review?" It is "is this the right journal model for the paper?"

That is why the better next reads are:

• Applied Sciences journal profile
• Applied Sciences submission guide
• Applied Sciences acceptance rate
• Applied Sciences cover letter guide

A Applied Sciences scope and signal check is usually more useful than optimizing around the 16-day figure.

Applied Sciences review time is fast enough to be attractive if the paper genuinely belongs in a broad MDPI applied-science venue. If not, the speed can become a distraction from the bigger issue, which is journal strategy. The timeline is real. It just should not be the main reason you choose the venue.