Science Advances Pre-Submission Checklist: Is Your Paper Ready?

4. Is the evidence package complete?

Science Advances reviewers expect thorough validation. Multiple lines of evidence, appropriate controls, and adequate sample sizes. A paper with one experiment supporting a large claim will draw immediate reviewer skepticism.

5. Are the methods detailed and reproducible?

Full experimental details in the Materials and Methods section. Software versions, reagent sources, statistical analysis pipeline. The supplementary materials should contain everything needed for reproduction that does not fit in the main text.

6. Are the statistical claims properly supported?

Each test reported in full, with the test statistic and P value. Point estimates accompanied by a measure of uncertainty such as a confidence interval. Statistical tests matched to data types. Any adjustment for multiple testing reported. n stated for every statistic and sample sizes justified. Science Advances follows the Science journals' statistical analysis policy.

7. Are data and materials available?

The Science journals require data availability. All data used in the analysis must be available to any researcher for purposes of reproducing or extending the analysis, in the paper or in a repository, with accession numbers where data are deposited. Author-written code that is not yet public should be archived in a permanent public repository before publication.

8. Are all materials available or described for reproduction?

Unique biological materials, chemical compounds, or computational tools must be available to other researchers or described in sufficient detail for independent creation.

9. Are all ethics approvals in place?

Human subjects and animal research require appropriate institutional approvals stated explicitly in the methods. Clinical trials should generally be registered, with the registration number given in the acknowledgments.

10. Is the manuscript free of dual-use or security concerns?

Science Advances follows AAAS policy on dual-use research. Authors are expected to notify editors if a manuscript could be considered to report dual use research of concern, and the cover letter is a natural place to flag it.

A Science Advances senior deputy editor has written that the editors "want to select papers that entice readers outside your field." Papers can be desk-rejected because the framing is too specialist. The abstract and introduction should be comprehensible to a scientist in a different discipline, and the author instructions ask for an abstract written for a general readership. If a biologist cannot understand why a materials science paper matters from the first page, the framing needs revision before submission.

The Science Advances Information for Authors page allows Research Articles of up to 15,000 words, with up to 10 figures and/or tables combined, 80 references, and an abstract of no more than 150 words. The AAAS licensing and charges page lists the base APC at $5,450 before eligible discounts. Authors submit through the AAAS/Science submission system at AAAS journal page.

Publication-shape calibration examples include broad plastics life-cycle accounting (10.1126/sciadv.1700782), sixth-mass-extinction rate analysis (10.1126/sciadv.1400253), and molecular neurotoxicity work (10.1126/sciadv.1600014). Use examples like these to calibrate breadth, evidence shape, and cross-field readability, not to imitate topic selection.

Science Advances does not use Nature's Reporting Summary or Cell's STAR Methods structure. Instead, the Science journals publish their own statistical analysis policy, require authors to follow ARRIVE for animal research, ask for a CONSORT checklist for randomized trials, and encourage authors to follow the relevant reporting standards for their field (for example STROBE for observational studies or PRISMA for systematic reviews) and to report which were followed.

Before upload, confirm that the relevant checklist is completed and that the statistics section reports each test in full, point estimates with a measure of uncertainty, and a justified sample size. A missing or mismatched reporting standard, or a statistics section that does not follow the Science journals' policy, can signal that the evidence package is not review-ready, regardless of how strong the headline result is.

Check your readiness for Science Advances in about two to three minutes. The free Manusights scan evaluates your manuscript against the journal's editorial standards and gives you a readiness score, first-screening signal, and the top issues with direct quotes from your paper.

For deeper analysis, the Science Advances submission readiness check delivers citation-integrity checks against scholarly metadata sources, figure-level feedback, and a prioritized revision checklist calibrated to Science Advances. Citation risk in the report is checked against CrossRef and PubMed.

Before upload, Science Advances editors need to see more than a technically correct field paper. They need a package that explains why the advance matters outside the narrowest specialty, makes the core result visible early, and has data, code, and statistical reporting ready enough for review.

Use this final pass as a Science Advances-specific checklist:

• Does the abstract explain the advance to a scientist outside the immediate subfield?

• Does Figure 1 or the first result make the central claim visible without a specialist tour?

• Does the data and code statement name repositories, accession numbers, DOIs, or specific restrictions?

• Does the cover letter name the subject section and explain the broader-readership case?

• Does the manuscript use the generous length to clarify evidence, not to bury the main result?

AAAS reports 35,831 submissions for 2025, an 8.8% accept rate, and a 16.4% external review rate, so most submissions are not externally reviewed. The most common preventable reasons:

The abstract is written for specialists. A Science Advances senior deputy editor wrote that the editors "act as curators" who "want to select papers that entice readers outside your field." The single most common reason a Science Advances-quality paper gets desk rejected is that the abstract assumes specialist knowledge. If a biologist cannot understand why a chemistry paper matters from the abstract, the framing is too narrow.

The advance is incremental. Science Advances wants "significance and impact that is more than incremental over other papers." Extending known results, confirming previous findings with slightly different methods, or improving performance by modest margins does not meet this bar.

Overstatement in the title or abstract. A Science Advances senior deputy editor wrote that "Overstatement drastically reduces interest, both for the editors and for the readers." A title that claims too much relative to the evidence triggers editorial skepticism immediately.

Statistical rigor is insufficient. The Science journals' statistical analysis policy asks for full reporting of tests, measures of uncertainty and multiple-testing adjustments. Underpowered studies, missing effect sizes, absent confidence intervals, and inappropriate statistical tests are common reasons for rejection both at desk and at peer review in the manuscripts we see.

The evidence is incomplete. Missing controls, insufficient validation, or a single experimental approach supporting a major claim will draw immediate skepticism.

For more detail, see the Science Advances Submission Guide and Science Advances Under Evaluation.

• Science Advances Under Evaluation: Status Meanings

• Science Advances Acceptance Rate

• Science Advances Impact Factor

• Science Advances vs Nature Communications

• Science Advances vs PNAS

Across Manusights submission reviews for manuscripts that authors are preparing for Science Advances, the failure mode is rarely weak science. It is narrow framing and an evidence package that is not yet review-ready. Three patterns recur, and each names a manuscript component you can test before upload.

Abstract and first figure written for specialists: The abstract and Figure 1 assume the reader is already inside the subfield, so the broad-science significance never lands on page one. Science Advances editors curate for papers that entice readers outside the author's field, so a specialist-only abstract is the single most common desk-reject trigger we see, even when the result is strong.

Methods and statistics below the AAAS bar: The Materials and Methods section omits software versions, reagent sources, or a justified sample size, and the statistics report significance without exact p-values, effect sizes, or confidence intervals. Science Advances follows AAAS statistical reporting standards, and reviewers treat a thin statistics section as a reason to doubt the whole evidence package.

Data, code, and cover letter not aligned with the claim: The data and code availability statement lacks a repository, accession number, or DOI, or the cover letter never names the subject section and the broad-readership case. When the abstract promises a broad advance but the reproducibility trail and the cover letter make a narrow, specialist argument, the editor sees a mismatch and screens it out.

The common thread is that the abstract, figures, methods, statistics, data, and cover letter all have to make the same general-science argument. Science Advances is far more tolerant than Science on headline magnitude, but it is not tolerant of a package where one component still reads narrow. When the science is strong but the framing or the evidence trail lags, the desk decision usually follows that weakness before a reviewer is ever assigned.