How to Write a European Respiratory Journal Cover Letter

Source: Manusights editorial framework for European Respiratory Journal cover letters

The order matters. ERJ editors triage for editorial signal density at the fit screen, not literary polish. A letter that states significance, argues breadth, flags reporting, and justifies fit in that sequence is faster to route.

Two sentences are non-negotiable. State them plainly near the end of the letter:

This manuscript is original, has not been published previously, and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript and consent to its submission to the European Respiratory Journal.

That pair confirms the submission is exclusive and that authorship is settled. Editors read the absence of either line as a process gap, and process gaps invite a closer look at everything else.

The opener is where the clinical-significance framing either lands or stalls. The one-line rule:

Avoid openers that describe the disease burden and the methods you used.
Use openers that state the unresolved clinical question and what your result changes.

Compare these two full examples.

Weak opener:

"We studied lung function decline in patients with COPD using spirometry and a single-centre observational cohort."

Why it fails: there is no gap, no claim, and no reason a broad ERS readership should care. It reads like a methods summary, and the editor cannot tell what changes for respiratory practice.

Stronger opener:

"Whether early small-airway dysfunction predicts accelerated lung-function decline independently of established COPD staging has remained unresolved. Here we show, in a multi-centre cohort with external validation, that a small-airway oscillometry index identifies a high-risk group missed by current staging, a finding that could change how clinicians stratify COPD patients for early intervention."

Why it works: the unresolved clinical question is concrete, the finding is a direct claim, the external validation answers the breadth screen, and the consequence for respiratory practice is explicit. That is exactly the clinical-significance test ERJ editors apply on first read.

The European Respiratory Journal publishes several article types, and the editor routes the manuscript partly on which one you declare. Name it in the first paragraph.

Source: European Respiratory Journal instructions for authors, ERS Publications (accessed June 2026)

ERS Statements run through a different, ERS-task-force-commissioned channel rather than the standard manuscript route, so do not submit one cold. The first submission uses a relaxed "my paper, my way" format; reformatting to house style happens at revision. If you are unsure whether the work is an Original Article or a Research Letter, the honest test is whether the integrated argument genuinely needs the extra display items or whether you are padding to look more complete.

Speaking from the editor's side of the desk: when we read an ERJ cover letter during the fit screen, we are not asking whether the statistics are sophisticated. We assume the methods are competent. We are asking one question first, in the opening two sentences: would a respiratory clinician anywhere in the ERS readership do something differently because of this result, and does the evidence generalise beyond the centre that produced it?

If the answer is no, the routing decision is usually made before we reach the figures, because the paper is a better fit for ERJ Open Research or a specialist title. The letters that earn a full read are the ones where the clinical consequence is obvious and the external validity is stated, not implied.

If you want a second read on whether your letter passes that fit screen, a European Respiratory Journal scope-fit framing check scores it before you upload.

One framing decision the cover letter forces is the venue ladder above ERJ. A respiratory randomised trial with genuinely practice-changing external validity sometimes belongs at a general-medicine flagship such as The Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), or at The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, before ERJ; the BMJ-owned Thorax sits just below ERJ for clinically-anchored work.

If your cover letter has to oversell to clear ERJ's breadth bar, the honest move is usually one rung down the ERS family to ERJ Open Research, not one rung up. The Lancet and NEJM reject most respiratory submissions on practice-change grounds, so naming the realistic target in the letter, rather than aiming above the evidence, reads as editorial maturity.

In our pre-submission review work with European Respiratory Journal manuscripts, four cover-letter patterns predict a fit-screen rejection more reliably than anything in the manuscript body. Each is testable against your own letter before you upload.

A single-centre study framed as practice-changing without external validity. This is the single most common failure we see in European Respiratory Journal cover letters. The letter claims the result should change clinical practice, but the study is one centre, one cohort, and one setting, and the letter never argues generalisability. The ERJ editor is reading for breadth across the European Respiratory Society readership, so the practice-changing claim collapses on the first read.

The fix is to state, in one sentence, the external-validation or multi-centre evidence that lets the finding travel beyond your site, or to soften the claim to match the design.

The reporting checklist and trial registration are missing from the letter. Across European Respiratory Journal manuscripts coming through pre-submission review, letters that never name CONSORT, STROBE, or PRISMA, and never state the trial-registration number, force the desk editor to hunt through the methods for compliance.

For randomised trials this is fatal: ERJ will not publish an RCT that was not prospectively registered in a WHO-compliant registry, and a letter silent on registration signals an unregistered or retrospectively registered trial. The fix is one line naming the checklist and the registry and number.

A mechanistic-only paper that never argues why ERJ over a specialist science journal. ERS instructions are explicit that in-vitro or mechanistic-only work with no patient samples and no disease model must state in the cover letter why it suits the European Respiratory Journal rather than a specialist mechanistic-science venue.

Many otherwise strong mechanistic letters skip this entirely, and the editor reads the omission as a scope mismatch and routes the paper to Respiratory Research or a basic-science title. The fix is one sentence connecting the mechanism to a clinical or translational consequence a respiratory audience will act on.

Article-type and scope-fit signals are missing or wrong. A surprising number of European Respiratory Journal letters never name whether the submission is an Original Article or a Research Letter, and never argue why ERJ over AJRCCM, Thorax, Chest, or ERJ Open Research. That forces the editor to infer routing, which slows triage and weakens the fit case.

The strongest letters name the article type and the display-item count in the first paragraph and close with one sentence on why this ERS title is the right home, including openness to an ERJ Open Research redirect if the editor sees a better fit in the ERS family.

These four are all fixable in an afternoon, and they are exactly what a European Respiratory Journal cover letter framing check evaluates before you commit to submission. The pattern that holds across all four: the editor is judging whether the letter proves the work changes respiratory practice for a broad readership, with the reporting discipline to back it.

If you cannot write the clinical-significance sentence without it sounding forced, that is useful information. It may mean the work is a sound but local contribution, in which case ERJ Open Research, Thorax, Chest, or a specialist title is the more honest target. The cover letter is diagnostically useful precisely because it forces you to state what changes and for whom.

For target-fit before you write the letter, the European Respiratory Journal submission guide covers the ERS Statements process and the full mechanics, the best pulmonology journals comparison is the natural cross-check against AJRCCM, Thorax, Chest, and Lancet Respiratory Medicine, the European Respiratory Journal journal hub carries the profile, and the clinical-trial pre-submission review overview covers reporting and registration discipline in depth.

How this page was created: this guide combines the European Respiratory Journal and ERS author guidance, the ERS instructions for authors and manuscript-preparation pages, the ERS publication-ethics statement, ICMJE registration and reporting policy, Clarivate JCR context, and Manusights pre-submission review patterns from respiratory-medicine manuscripts. We did not access a private ERS editorial account; the cover-letter guidance is built from public ERS materials and the editorial fit-screen pattern we see across pre-submission reviews.

The named failure patterns above are drawn from our review data, not from any single submission, and no specific editor or reviewer is named because rosters change and per-submission attribution is not something this page can verify.