Scientific Reports Review Time: Why It Takes 4 Months (And What to Do)

Scientific Reports processes over 50,000 submissions per year, which partially explains its notoriously long turnaround. The average time from submission to first decision runs around 120 days: roughly 4 months. That's longer than Nature Communications (8-12 weeks), longer than PLOS ONE (6-8 weeks), and longer than most researchers expect from a journal at this impact factor.

If you're submitting to Scientific Reports, here's exactly what happens at each stage and why the process takes as long as it does.

Timeline at a glance

Total time from submission to published article: 6-12 months for most papers. The median is around 4-5 months to acceptance for papers that eventually get accepted.

Stage 1: Editorial screening (weeks 1-4)

When you submit to Scientific Reports, an academic editor assigned to your subject area does an initial desk review. This isn't a quick 5-minute scan. Scientific Reports editors are working researchers who evaluate your paper against several criteria before sending it to external review.

What they're checking:

Scientific validity. Is the study design appropriate? Are the conclusions supported by the data? Do the methods look sound at first glance? Editors won't catch every statistical error, but obvious problems get flagged here.

Scope. Scientific Reports publishes empirical research from all natural sciences: biology, chemistry, physics, earth sciences, clinical medicine, and more. What it doesn't publish: review articles, opinion pieces, case reports without novel scientific findings, or theoretical-only papers with no experimental component. This trips up a lot of submitters.

Reporting compliance. Clinical trials need CONSORT. Observational studies need STROBE. Animal studies need ARRIVE. Missing compliance is a common desk rejection trigger.

Data availability statement. Scientific Reports requires a specific, verifiable data availability statement. "Data available on request" has not been acceptable for several years. You need a repository link or a clear explanation of why the data can't be shared publicly.

Stage 2: Reviewer recruitment (weeks 3-8)

This is the main reason Scientific Reports takes so long. The journal handles submissions across dozens of scientific disciplines: finding two or three qualified reviewers for a paper on, say, deep-sea microbiology or photovoltaic nanomaterials takes time.

Editors typically invite 6-10 potential reviewers to secure 2-3 who actually agree to review. Established researchers get dozens of review requests per year and decline most of them. For specialized papers, the pool of genuinely qualified reviewers is small.

If your paper is in a niche field, expect reviewer recruitment to take 4-6 weeks. Mainstream topics with many potential reviewers (oncology, ecology, neuroscience) tend to move faster.

One thing that helps: suggesting 4-5 specific reviewers in your cover letter. Editorial managers use these lists. Reviewers you suggest still go through conflict-of-interest checks, but they're much more likely to say yes because they've implicitly been told someone in the field thinks their input is relevant.

Stage 3: External peer review (weeks 8-18)

Once reviewers accept, they typically have 2-4 weeks to submit their reports. In practice, many take longer. Reviewers are volunteers with their own deadlines, and review extensions are common.

Scientific Reports uses a structured review form. Reviewers evaluate:

• Scientific soundness and validity
• Whether methods are described with enough detail for replication
• Whether conclusions are supported by the data
• Data quality and presentation

Notably, reviewers are NOT asked to evaluate novelty or significance the way Nature or Cell reviewers are. Scientific Reports's mandate is technically sound science, not breakthrough findings. This matters for how you frame your paper: don't bury yourself defending significance claims that editors don't actually require.

Stage 4: First decision

After reviews come in, the academic editor makes a recommendation. At Scientific Reports, first decisions typically fall into:

• Accept as is: Rare on first submission (under 5%)
• Minor revision: About 15-20% of papers that reach review
• Major revision: The most common outcome (~40%), meaning you're very likely to eventually be accepted
• Reject: About 35-40% of papers that reach review

Combined with the desk rejection rate, total rejection across all stages runs roughly 55-60%. The 57% acceptance figure you'll see cited reflects papers that survive initial screening: not all submissions.

Why does Scientific Reports take longer than PLOS ONE?

Both journals are open-access multidisciplinary journals with similar editorial philosophies. PLOS ONE typically returns a first decision in 6-8 weeks. Scientific Reports averages 16-20 weeks. The difference comes down to volume and infrastructure.

PLOS ONE has spent 20 years optimizing its editorial workflow. The journal processes everything faster: from screening to reviewer recruitment to decision timelines. Scientific Reports is part of the Springer Nature portfolio, which means its systems and editors are shared across multiple journals. That creates both cross-journal consistency and occasional bottlenecks.

For researchers choosing between the two: if timeline matters, PLOS ONE is reliably faster. If your institution values the Springer Nature portfolio association or you want the cascade option from higher-tier Nature journals, Scientific Reports is worth the extra wait.

Cascade submission from Nature portfolio journals

One underused feature of Scientific Reports: if a Nature portfolio journal (Nature, Nature Communications, Nature Medicine, and others) rejects your paper, the editor can offer to transfer it directly to Scientific Reports. Reviewer comments transfer with the paper.

This is a real time-saver. Instead of starting fresh with a new submission and new reviewer search, you enter the process with existing reviews already attached. The Scientific Reports editor reviews the paper in that context, which often means a faster path to a decision.

If you're planning to submit to Nature Communications first and expect a possible rejection, it's worth keeping Scientific Reports in your backup plan. The cascade option appears in the rejection email when editors think the work fits.

What triggers desk rejection

With a 57% acceptance rate, Scientific Reports is more accessible than most journals. But that doesn't mean getting past the desk is guaranteed. Common desk rejection reasons:

Missing data availability statement. This is probably the most common fixable rejection. The statement needs to specify exactly where data are deposited and how to access them. If you have proprietary or sensitive data, you need to explain the restriction explicitly.

Wrong paper type. Scientific Reports doesn't publish reviews, letters, or purely theoretical work. If you submit a narrative review, it gets desk rejected regardless of quality.

Sample size problems. Underpowered studies without power calculations get flagged. You don't need the largest possible sample: but you need to justify the size you used.

Ethics documentation gaps. Human subjects research needs IRB or equivalent documentation. Animal research needs the equivalent institutional approval. Missing this is an automatic desk rejection.

Replication of established findings without clear added value. Scientific Reports doesn't require novelty, but it does require that the study adds something: new data, a new population, a new context. Pure replications rarely pass editorial screening.

What to do while you wait

Four months is a long time. Here's how to use it productively:

Don't submit elsewhere. Scientific Reports (like most journals) requires exclusive submission. Submitting the same paper simultaneously to another journal violates their policies and creates problems if both accept.

Check status at 6 weeks. If your paper status hasn't moved from "Under Editorial Review" after 6 weeks, it's appropriate to send a polite inquiry to the editorial office. They won't have a specific answer most of the time, but it confirms your paper is in the queue.

Start working on the revision. Read the reviewer comments from your last submission (if this is a re-submission from elsewhere). Start thinking about what objections reviewers are likely to raise. If you had the paper pre-reviewed before submission, revisit those notes. Arriving at the revision stage already prepared saves 2-4 weeks of scrambling.

Don't assume silence means rejection. Scientific Reports will contact you. Long silences are usually just slow reviewer recruitment, not a signal about your paper's fate.

Should you get pre-submission review?

Scientific Reports's relatively high acceptance rate makes some researchers skip pre-submission preparation. That's a mistake for a specific reason: the 4-month wait means getting desk rejected at week 3 costs you 3 months of potential review time elsewhere.

A pre-submission check is worth it if:

• Your data availability statement isn't rock solid
• Your methods section is vague about key details
• You're uncertain whether your paper type fits the journal
• Your previous submission attempt got desk rejected without a clear reason

See our avoid desk rejection service for what a pre-submission review covers. The Scientific Reports journal guide has detailed scope information, recent acceptance rate trends, and APC details. For comparison, the PLOS ONE submission process shows how the timelines differ between the two main multidisciplinary open-access journals.

Impact factor data from Clarivate Journal Citation Reports.

The Bottom Line

Scientific Reports' 120-day timeline is long for what's ultimately a methodology-first journal. The wait is driven by reviewer recruitment, not editorial ambiguity about your work. If your paper is clearly sound and in-scope, the wait is the main cost. If it's not clearly sound, you'll find out at the end of a 4-month queue.

Sources

• Journal official submission guidelines
• Author experience data compiled from journal tracker communities (SciRev, Researcher.Life)
• Editorial policies published on journal homepage
• Pre-Submission Checklist , 25-point audit before you submit

See also

• Scientific Reports Submission Guide
• Is Scientific Reports a Good Journal?
• Scientific Reports vs PLOS ONE

Compare Review Times

See how Scientific Reports compares to other open access journals in our review timelines tool. Also see: Scientific Reports vs PLOS ONE and open access multidisciplinary journals.