Scientific Reports Submission Status Explained: What Each Stage Means for Your Paper

Source: Springer Nature submission system, Scientific Reports editorial process documentation, April 2026.

Received

Administrative. Your files passed the format check and the system logged your submission. Manuscript number assigned. No editorial judgment has been made. If you see Received for more than 3 business days, check that your files were complete and in the correct format (PDF, Word, or LaTeX depending on what was requested). Contact the editorial office if it persists longer.

Editor Assigned

A handling editor with expertise in your subject area has been assigned and is reading your paper. Scientific Reports uses academic editors who are active researchers in specific fields. The editor is evaluating:

• Scope fit (empirical research in the natural sciences; no reviews, letters, or purely theoretical work)
• Basic scientific soundness
• Reporting compliance (CONSORT for clinical trials, STROBE for observational studies, ARRIVE for animal research)
• Data availability statement completeness

About 40% of Scientific Reports submissions end at this stage with a desk rejection. The most common avoidable desk rejection triggers are a missing or insufficient data availability statement ("data available on request" is not acceptable) and mismatched paper type (review articles are not published here regardless of quality).

If your paper passes the desk screen, the status advances to Reviewer Invited. This is a meaningful positive signal.

Reviewer Invited

This is the status that causes the most anxiety, and the most misinterpretation.

Reviewer Invited means the handling editor is actively searching for peer reviewers but has not yet confirmed any. The editor typically sends invitations to 6-10 potential reviewers and waits for responses. Many decline. Finding 2 qualified, willing reviewers across Scientific Reports' 50,000+ annual submissions is a logistical challenge the journal has not fully solved.

What a long Reviewer Invited period means:

It means the editor has not secured reviewers yet. It says nothing about the quality of your paper. There is no negative signal in a 4-week Reviewer Invited period for a paper in a specialized field with a small reviewer pool. Niche fields (deep-sea ecology, photovoltaic nanomaterials, specific surgical techniques) take longer because there are fewer qualified reviewers globally and many are already reviewing for other journals.

The status will eventually advance to Under Review once at least one reviewer accepts. If Reviewer Invited persists beyond 45 days, a brief, polite email to the editorial office is appropriate. Keep it to one sentence: "I'm writing to inquire about the reviewer recruitment status for manuscript [number], which has been at Reviewer Invited for [duration]. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help." Do not follow up before 45 days.

One thing you can do proactively: suggest 4-5 specific qualified reviewers in your cover letter. Suggested reviewers still go through conflict-of-interest checks, but they are far more likely to accept because someone in the field has specifically identified them as appropriate. This is one of the most consistently effective ways to reduce the Reviewer Invited wait time.

Under Review

Your paper is with peer reviewers who have accepted the assignment and are actively evaluating it.

This status change is meaningful. The transition from Reviewer Invited to Under Review tells you that at least one and typically two reviewers have agreed to evaluate your manuscript. The editorial bottleneck (finding reviewers) is behind you.

What reviewers at Scientific Reports are evaluating:

• Scientific soundness: Is the study design appropriate? Are the methods described in enough detail for replication? Do the conclusions follow from the data?
• Data and statistical quality: Are the analyses appropriate for the data type? Are error bars and confidence intervals reported correctly? Is the statistical power justified?
• Reporting completeness: Does the paper include what it promises? Are figures and tables well-labeled?

What they are NOT evaluating:

• Novelty or significance (Scientific Reports' editorial model explicitly does not require broad significance)
• Whether the result advances the field in a major way

This means the review process at Scientific Reports is focused and relatively predictable. Papers with sound methods and clear data presentation do well. Papers with vague statistical justifications or incomplete methods sections generate major revision requests.

SciRev community data (based on 182 author-reported submissions to Scientific Reports) shows a median of approximately 2.7 months from submission to first decision. That is consistent with the 4-10 week Under Review window plus the preceding Reviewer Invited period, which is the main source of variance at this journal.

Reviews Complete

All reviewers have submitted their reports. The handling editor now has everything needed to make a decision.

This is almost always a short status, 3-10 days. Reviews Complete means the editorial bottleneck is over. The decision is now the editor's alone.

If Reviews Complete extends beyond 2 weeks, it may mean:

• The editor is seeking a third reviewer's opinion (happens when two reports are in direct conflict)
• The editor is consulting a statistical reviewer for papers with complex quantitative methods
• Administrative queue at a busy period

None of these are negative signals about your paper.

Decision Pending

The editor is writing the final decision letter. This is 3-10 days. Check your email regularly. The decision arrives same-day or next-day after the status changes to Decision Made.

Decision Made

The decision letter is in your email. If no email arrives within 24 hours:

1. Check spam and promotions folders
2. Check the address you used to create your Springer Nature account
3. Log back into the submission system (the decision may be viewable there)
4. Contact the editorial office with your manuscript number

Does Scientific Reports send email notifications for status changes? The journal sends an automated email when the decision is made. Earlier status transitions (Received, Editor Assigned, Reviewer Invited, Under Review) do not trigger individual notification emails. Authors need to check the submission system dashboard at submission.springernature.com to track intermediate status changes. This is a common source of confusion: if you received no email, it does not mean nothing has happened. Log in and check the dashboard.

Accept as Submitted

Uncommon on first round (under 5% of reviewed papers). Scientific Reports is more accessible than selective journals but reviewers still find things to request. A clean accept means both reviewers found the methods, data, and conclusions fully satisfactory.

Minor Revision

Small changes: clarification of specific methods, additional references, minor figure adjustments, wording changes for clarity. The editor usually handles the revised paper without returning to reviewers. Address every point specifically in your revision response. Respond within 2-4 weeks rather than using the maximum window.

Major Revision

Substantive concerns about methodology, statistical analysis, or the data-conclusion relationship. Most papers requiring major revision at Scientific Reports are eventually accepted. The reviewer comments are focused on scientific quality, not significance, so the path to acceptance is usually clear.

Read the reports carefully before responding. Identify which concerns require new experiments or analyses versus which can be addressed with additional explanation. Respond to every point in your revision letter, even if you disagree. A clear explanation of why you did not incorporate a specific suggestion is better than ignoring it.

Major revision responses are due in 30-60 days typically, though you can request an extension for complex revisions requiring new data.

Reject

About 35-40% of papers that reach external review are rejected. The decision letter includes the reviewer reports. Scientific Reports reviewers write constructive reports focused on technical quality, so rejection letters are generally informative about what would need to change for the paper to succeed elsewhere.

If the rejection is based on fixable technical concerns rather than fundamental flaws, the comments are still useful for revising before submitting to another journal.

In our pre-submission review work with manuscripts targeting Scientific Reports, three failure patterns generate the most consistent desk rejections and major revision requests. We find these across manuscripts we've reviewed through our Scientific Reports submission readiness check, and they reliably predict which papers will struggle with the Editor Assigned desk screen.

The data availability statement that doesn't actually make data available. We observe this as the single most common avoidable desk rejection trigger at Scientific Reports. The journal explicitly states that "data available on request" does not meet their policy. We find that roughly 35% of manuscripts we review have data availability statements that either use this phrase or link to data that requires requesting access from the authors. Scientific Reports editors specifically check this at the desk. Papers that deposit data in Figshare, Zenodo, or a field-specific repository before submission clear this screen consistently; papers that don't are returned before review begins.

The conclusions section that extends beyond what the data support. We see this pattern most frequently in single-center studies and in papers with small sample sizes. Scientific Reports reviewers are explicitly evaluating whether conclusions match the data, not whether the finding is important. We find that papers which confidently claim generalizability from a study of 45 patients in one hospital generate predictable major revision requests asking authors to scope down the discussion. The fix is stating limitations in the results section, not burying them in a final paragraph.

The methods section that describes what was done but not how to replicate it. Scientific Reports reviews for reproducibility. We observe that papers from lab groups where methods are tacitly understood by specialists fail the editorial standard for general readers. SciRev community data consistently shows "insufficient methods detail" as a top revision request at Scientific Reports. Specific gaps we see: reagent concentrations omitted, software versions not specified, statistical tests named but not justified for the data type.

How this page was created: sources used include Scientific Reports author instructions, Scientific Reports editorial policies, Springer Nature submission-system guidance, SciRev author-reported timing, and Manusights internal analysis of manuscripts prepared for Scientific Reports and adjacent broad-scope journals. We did not test a private live Springer Nature submission dashboard for this page; status guidance is based on public Springer Nature materials, documented author experience, and pre-submission review patterns.

In our analysis of Scientific Reports status cases, the named failure pattern is treating "Under Review" as a guarantee of acceptance. It is a positive status because the paper has moved beyond reviewer recruitment, but reviewers are still testing scientific soundness, data availability, statistics, and methods detail.

What Scientific Reports does well: clear broad-scope soundness review, explicit author instructions, a data-availability policy, and a status path where Reviewer Invited and Under Review mean different things.

Where the process falls short for authors: reviewer recruitment can be slow, status labels do not explain why a delay is happening, and the system does not separate "one reviewer accepted" from "all reports are progressing."

Use this page for status meanings and follow-up timing. Use the Scientific Reports review time guide for full timeline planning and the Scientific Reports journal overview for fit and reputation context.

Contact Scientific Reports through the submission system messaging function or via the journal's editorial contact page on nature.com/srep.