Manuscript status changed from "Under review" to "Required reviews completed" and again to "Under review" I submitted a paper to a journal where the status changes from &quot;Under review&quot; to &quot;Required reviews completed&quot;. The status &quot;Required reviews completed&quot; was there for 2 days. Now, again it is showing &quot;Under review&quot;. What could this mean?
As @user2768 points out in the question's comment section, we can't know the internals of a reviewing system. However, I tried here to provide a possible explanation for this change from &quot;required reviews completed&quot; to &quot;under review&quot;.
&quot;Required reviews completed&quot;: This is a status which shows up when a minimal number of reviews for an article is received. For instance, some journals have required the minimum number of reviews being set to 2. So, when the journal office receives 2 reviews from the reviewers, the status is displayed. Elsevier provides this reference.
Note that the reviews sometimes be lousy and not detailed, and sometimes very conflicting reviews (e.g. review comments by two different reviewers are completely opposite to each other). In this case, the (associate) editor has a hard time making a decision. A possible way to resolve this conflict is to get another review, and therefore (s)he could send the article to a third reviewer. Then, the status changes to &quot;under review&quot; again.
Don't worry about all these. These things are pretty normal in peer-review system.