We are dealing with the validity of a large deviation principle for a class of reaction-diffusion equations with polynomial nonlinearity, perturbed by a Gaussian random forcing. We are here interested in the regime where both the strength of the noise and its correlation are vanishing, on a length scale $ε$ and $δ(ε)$, respectively, with $0<ε,δ(ε)<<1$. We prove that, under the assumption that $ε$ and $δ(ε)$ satisfy a suitable scaling limit, a large deviation principle holds in the space of continuous trajectories with values both in the space of square-integrable functions and in Sobolev spaces of negative exponent. Our result is valid, without any restriction on the degree of the polynomial nor on the space dimension.