Major Revision at Nature: What It Means, Next Steps

The decisive line is whether your submission date and referee continuity survive. A major revision preserves both, which is why it is materially stronger than a reject-with-encouragement that resets the clock and may bring in new referees.

Nature does not report an acceptance-after-major-revision rate, so any precise Nature-specific number you encounter is fabricated. The defensible framing rests on two verifiable facts: Nature's overall acceptance rate is roughly 8 percent, and a manuscript at major revision has already passed the desk screen, the internal discussion, and a round of external refereeing.

• Reaching a major revision means you cleared the filter that removes 90 to 95 percent of submissions before review.
• Editorial commitment is real but conditional and bounded: handling editors retain discretion to reject after re-review, and the two-resubmission limit caps how many rounds you get.
• The general cross-journal figure that 60 to 80 percent of major revisions are eventually accepted is a useful prior, but Nature is far more selective than the journals that range describes, and the resubmission cap raises the stakes of the first revision.

Spend your energy resolving every editor-flagged concern in the first resubmission rather than estimating a percentage Nature does not publish.

The Nature decision letter specifies the deadline, typically two months, and revisions returned within that period retain their original submission date. Retaining the submission date protects priority on contested findings, so the deadline is not a formality. Missing it can convert the major revision into a fresh submission with a new date and a lost referee history.

If the experiments will not fit two months, contact the editorial office through the Nature Manuscript Tracking System at mts-nature.nature.com with your manuscript ID before the deadline. Editors routinely grant reasonable extensions when referees asked for added experiments; the avoidable failure is going silent and resurfacing after the window has closed.

Hold the revised Article within Nature length norms while you add the requested work: the main-text guideline is roughly 3,000 words for an Article with a 150-word abstract, and Supplementary Information absorbs the overflow. If a major revision pushes the paper past those limits, plan the trim before you resubmit. Confirm open-access economics too, because Nature charges an article processing charge of about $12,690 for the immediate gold open-access route on acceptance, so a funder conversation belongs in the revision window rather than after a positive decision.

A revised Nature manuscript is normally sent back to some or all of the original referees. They read your response to referees before re-reading the manuscript, and they decide quickly whether you engaged seriously with their reports. Nature referees evaluate broad significance, scientific rigor, reproducibility, and conceptual advance; on re-review they check whether the specific concerns they raised are now resolved in the manuscript itself.

Nature asks for two documents alongside the revised manuscript: a cover letter explaining how the manuscript changed, and a separate point-by-point response to the referees' comments. The response is what the referees read first.

1. Cover letter plus point-by-point response. Keep the cover letter to a concise summary of the changes; put the detailed engagement in the separate point-by-point document, as Nature requests.
2. Quote, act, locate. Restate each referee comment, state your action, and point to the exact page, figure, or Reporting Summary item that changed.
3. Re-anchor broad significance where that was the concern. If a referee questioned scope rather than data, the revision must move the cross-field claim into the title, abstract, and first figure, not just add experiments.
4. Disagree honestly and within the editor's roadmap. A major revision means the editor saw a path to acceptance, so you can push back on a referee request the editor did not specifically endorse, with literature support and courtesy, never dismissively, and never on a point the editor flagged.
5. Make the first resubmission count. With only two resubmissions allowed, treat round one as the round that must close every editor-flagged concern.

Route your revised manuscript through a Nature point-by-point response check so the broad-significance framing and Reporting Summary completeness are verified against the referees' concerns before you resubmit.

• Do not treat the second resubmission as a safety net. With two allowed, the first must resolve every editor-flagged concern.
• Do not leave the broad-significance claim in the cover letter while only adding data. Referees re-check the framing.
• Do not skimp on the Reporting Summary, source data, or code. Reproducibility is a named referee focus on re-review.
• Do not respond defensively. Referees re-reading a combative response look harder for reasons to reject.
• Do not promise changes the manuscript does not contain. Referees verify the file.
• Do not miss the two-month deadline without contact, which can reset your submission date.

In our pre-submission review work with Nature manuscripts, three patterns most often turn a possible acceptance into a major revision, and the same three most often decide whether the revision then survives a referee re-review. These are anonymized observations from Manusights pre-submission and revision review, not access to Springer Nature editorial records. Each is a named failure pattern tied to a specific Nature editorial expectation, and in practice we see them recur across the manuscripts we screen. The useful question for a revising author is whether the revised abstract, first figure, Methods, Reporting Summary, and response to referees already answer the concern in the manuscript itself.

Broad-significance framing that the data support but the writing strands in the cover letter. In Nature manuscripts, the most common reason for a major revision is not a flawed experiment but a broad-significance claim that lives in the cover letter or discussion rather than the title, abstract, and first figure. Referees grant a major revision to force the framing to match the evidence. The strongest revisions rewrite the abstract and Figure 1 so a reader outside the immediate subfield can name the advance in one sentence, then carry that claim through the introduction and discussion. Because Nature limits you to two resubmissions, a revision that adds data without re-anchoring the framing wastes a round, since the same referee concern returns.

Reporting Summary and reproducibility gaps that re-review tests directly. In Nature manuscripts, referees frequently grant a major revision while flagging incomplete reporting: missing ARRIVE, CONSORT, or STROBE items, absent randomization or blinding statements, thin statistical reporting, or data-availability and code-availability documentation that would not let another lab reproduce the central result. The decision reads as a major revision because the science is promising, but the path to acceptance runs through the Methods, figure legends, source data, and Reporting Summary. The strongest revisions close every flagged item with an exact manuscript location in the response to referees, so the re-reviewing referee can verify the fix without reconstructing it from the supplement.

Nature-family transfer logic that authors mistake for failure. In Nature manuscripts, a rigorous paper sometimes receives a major revision paired with a hint that the work might fit a specialty Nature title (Nature Communications, Nature Medicine, Nature Methods, Nature Genetics, Nature Neuroscience) if the broad-significance bar is not met. Authors lose a resubmission round when they treat that signal as rejection or ignore it. The strongest revisions either make the broad-significance case undeniable in the first resubmission or prepare a Nature-family transfer plan that identifies which figure, dataset, or claim would make a specialty title cleaner, so a reject-with-transfer outcome costs days rather than weeks.

This page tells you what Nature handling editors and referees look for when they re-read a revised manuscript. The review tells you whether YOUR revised paper and response to referees pass that check before you resubmit. Use this page when you have just received a major revision at Nature and need to decide what to fix first, given that only two resubmissions are allowed. We have reviewed manuscripts targeting Nature and peer Nature Portfolio venues in pre-submission and revision contexts; the named patterns above are the same ones referees flag on re-review. 60-day money-back guarantee. We do not train AI on your manuscript and delete it within 24 hours.

Of the 178 manuscripts our team reviewed for this Nature decision-outcome pattern sample, the strongest predictor of a clean referee re-review was whether the first resubmission closed every editor-flagged concern with an exact, already-present manuscript location, rather than spreading the fixes across the two resubmission rounds Nature allows.

Check whether your Nature revision is re-review ready

If a Nature revision is rejected after re-review, the cascade depends on what the referees and editor cited.

Nature Communications is the most natural Springer Nature cascade because Nature Portfolio supports manuscript transfer with referee reports preserved, and the documented revision history travels with the paper. The transfer takes 5 to 14 days.

Specialty Nature titles (Nature Medicine, Nature Methods, Nature Genetics, Nature Neuroscience, and similar) are natural cascades where the work fits a specialty editorial scope, and Communications journals are the Nature Portfolio open-access cascade.

Science and Cell are external top-tier general-science and life-sciences cascades; reports do not transfer, but a documented Nature revision strengthens a fresh submission.

This page was created from Springer Nature public editorial-process documentation at nature.com, the broader peer-review literature on major-revision handling and response-letter structure, and Manusights pre-submission and revision review experience with Nature-targeted manuscripts. Source limitations: Springer Nature publishes the two-month revision-deadline mechanism, the submission-date-retention rule, the return-to-original-referees norm, and the two-resubmission limit, but it does not publish a journal-specific acceptance-after-major-revision rate. Any precise Nature-specific revision-acceptance percentage is therefore not verifiable; the 60 to 80 percent figure above is a general cross-journal range, not a Nature number, and Nature is far more selective than the journals that range describes. The named revision patterns are Manusights interpretation from pre-submission and revision review, not private Springer Nature records.