European Respiratory Journal Submission Guide

Source: ERJ on ERS Publications, ERJ instructions for authors, Clarivate JCR 2024, accessed May 2026.

This is the ERJ-specific structural detail authors most often miss:

ERJ publishes ERS Statements, which are consensus and clinical-guidance documents commissioned by the European Respiratory Society. ERS Statements:

• Are typically commissioned through ERS task forces

• Cover consensus on diagnosis, treatment, or research priorities

• Have a different editorial process from regular Articles

• Are influential in European respiratory practice

The strategic implication: authors interested in this format should engage ERS task-force structures rather than submit through standard manuscript channels.

ERS calls for papers also show what the journal values when a topic is strategically important: clinical trials, clear mechanistic insight, endophenotypes, and work that alters clinical management or approaches. That is a useful proxy for normal submissions too. A manuscript can be technically sound and still weak for ERJ if it does not move respiratory understanding or respiratory care.

ERJ uses a "my paper, my way" first submission (relaxed formatting), then a structured editorial cadence at ERJ Manuscript Central (ScholarOne submission portal). Editors screen for broad respiratory consequence, reporting-standard compliance, and ERS audience fit.

Day 1-3: Receipt and tech-check

ERJ Manuscript Central confirms file integrity, the cover letter, ORCID, the structured abstract, the reporting checklist (CONSORT / STROBE / PRISMA), and trial registration where relevant. ERS Statements submitted through the standard channel without task-force engagement are returned for process reasons here.

Day 3-10: Chief Editor / handling-editor assignment

The Chief Editor or a handling editor takes the paper. The scope read decides desk-reject, redirect to ERJ Open Research / European Respiratory Review, or send for review based on broad-respiratory fit.

Week 1-4: Editorial fit + first decision window

ERJ targets an initial decision in 4-8 weeks. Desk-reject rate is high (the journal runs roughly 10% overall acceptance); the cutoff is broad respiratory consequence plus reporting discipline.

Week 4-12: External peer review

Two or three reviewers from the European academic respiratory community report. Reviewers check causal-language discipline, reporting-standard completeness, and whether the result travels beyond one cohort.

Week 8-16: Full-review decision

Reject / major revision / minor revision / accept. Revisions returned within the requested window typically reach the second decision in 4-6 weeks; reformatting to ERJ house style happens at the revision stage.

Three operational signals govern editorial assessment:

The editorial policy states the ERJ fit test through article type, reporting discipline, and ERS audience: original respiratory research must be clear enough for broad respiratory readers, and statement or guidance material has a separate ERS process rather than a normal article route.

1. Respiratory-medicine substance. ERJ requires substantive respiratory-medicine contribution.

2. Methodological rigor. Clinical trials require CONSORT compliance; observational studies require STROBE; meta-analyses require PRISMA.

3. Reporting transparency. Pre-registration encouraged; complete reporting per ERJ standards required.

4. Broad respiratory consequence. ERJ is not only asking whether the study is about lungs. Editors are asking whether the finding matters to respiratory researchers, clinicians, or guideline-facing audiences beyond one narrow site or cohort.

Recent ERJ issues span:

• COPD and asthma management

• Lung cancer screening and outcomes

• Interstitial lung disease (ILD) and IPF

• Tuberculosis and respiratory infections

• COVID-19 long-term respiratory effects

• Sleep-disordered breathing and OSA

• Pediatric respiratory disease

• Pulmonary hypertension

• Cystic fibrosis and CFTR modulators

Recent ERJ article anchors and editorial materials we checked include ERJ's 2026 editorial direction (10.1183/13993003.00026-2026), a severe asthma exacerbation-risk paper (10.1183/13993003.00413-2021), and COPD exacerbation-history work (10.1183/13993003.02240-2023). We used those not as templates to copy, but as examples of the journal's expected connection between respiratory evidence and clinical or mechanistic consequence.

Editors screen ERJ uploads against the following artifacts at ERJ Manuscript Central (ScholarOne submission portal). The first submission relaxes formatting, but the substantive artifacts below are still expected and missing ones trigger queries.

The required artifacts are the cover letter (articulating the broad respiratory-medicine consequence and any prior-rejection history), the manuscript with a structured abstract, the reporting checklist appropriate to the design (CONSORT for trials, STROBE for observational, PRISMA for systematic reviews), trial registration where relevant, the conflicts of interest declaration, the funding statement, the data availability statement, the ethics approval and informed-consent statement for human-subjects work, ORCID for the corresponding author, and suggested reviewers from the broad respiratory community.

Before upload, run your manuscript through an ERJ respiratory-medicine readiness check if the respiratory topic is strong but the clinical, translational, or reporting standard is still uncertain. If you are still comparing ERJ with AJRCCM, Lancet Respiratory Medicine, Thorax, or Chest, start with the general European Respiratory Journal manuscript fit check.

Use ERJ's own submission system and author correspondence for live timing. The submission decision you control is not a timing guess; it is whether the manuscript is shaped as broad respiratory medicine before the Chief Editor or handling editor evaluates fit.

Across respiratory-medicine manuscripts targeting European Respiratory Journal, three recurring decision risks matter most across submissions that ERJ editors filter out at the desk-screen stage. (Per European Respiratory Society published guidelines, ERJ uses a "my paper, my way" approach to initial submissions (relaxed formatting and word-limit enforcement for the first submission), publishes Original Articles, Review Articles, ERS Statements (consensus / clinical-guidance documents requiring ERS task-force engagement), Research Letters, Editorials, and Correspondence;

runs approximately 10 percent acceptance rate with 4-8 week initial-decision and 8-16 week full-review windows; and routes across the ERS journal family that includes ERJ Open Research, European Respiratory Review, and Breathe.

CONSORT 2010 / STROBE / PRISMA 2020 compliance is required for relevant article types at the desk-screen stage.) Use the three checks below before you open Publications source page submission slot.

Wrong respiratory venue chosen

Across ERJ-targeted manuscripts, we consistently see authors choose ERJ as the venue without distinguishing between the major respiratory-medicine journals based on the contribution's actual shape.

ERJ handling editors specifically check whether the manuscript fits ERJ (European-anchored academic respiratory medicine, mechanistic / translational / clinical pulmonology, ERS membership audience, methodologically rigorous original research with broad respiratory implications) or another venue:

• AJRCCM (American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, US-anchored, ATS membership audience, similar academic rigor with US-clinical context)

• Lancet Respiratory Medicine (broader scope, practice-changing clinical evidence, higher selectivity, more clinical-trial-focused)

• Thorax (UK-anchored, BTS audience, broad respiratory medicine)

• Chest (American College of Chest Physicians, broader pulmonology / critical care / sleep, more clinically-applied)

• ERJ Open Research (the ERS open-access companion accepting broader scope including replications and methodological work)

• European Respiratory Review (review-focused ERS journal)

• Respirology (Asian Pacific Society of Respirology)

• Pulmonary Pharmacology & Therapeutics (specialty for drug-development)

• Sleep Medicine / Sleep / Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine (sleep specialty)

• Critical Care Medicine / American Journal of Critical Care (critical-care specialty)

• Pediatric Pulmonology (pediatric specialty)

• Journal of Cystic Fibrosis (CF specialty)

• American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology (basic mechanistic)

Manuscripts misrouted face desk redirects within 1-2 weeks; for ERS Statements specifically, manuscripts submitted through standard channels without prior ERS task-force engagement get returned for process reasons before content evaluation.

The fix is to choose between ERJ (European-academic / broad-implications / methodologically-rigorous original research) and the alternatives based on the contribution's audience, geographic anchor, and methodological focus, and for any ERS Statement / consensus / clinical-guidance document, engage the ERS task-force structure through Ersnet source page before drafting.

Check wrong respiratory venue chosen where the paper fits ajrccm us anchored, lancet r before submitting to European Respiratory Journal →

Reporting-standards non-compliance at submission

We frequently see ERJ manuscripts arrive with incomplete reporting-standard compliance even when the underlying study is methodologically sound.

ERJ handling editors specifically check at desk for:

• CONSORT 2010 compliance for randomized trials (completed checklist with page-and-paragraph references, CONSORT flow diagram with explicit enrollment / allocation / follow-up / analysis numbers, trial registration with named registry (ClinicalTrials.gov / EudraCT / ISRCTN / WHO ICTRP) and registration number, primary outcome pre-specified and matching report)

• STROBE compliance for observational studies (completed STROBE checklist, eligibility criteria with explicit numerator / denominator, missing-data handling with proportion missing and method, sensitivity analyses for selection bias and confounding)

• PRISMA 2020 compliance for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA flow diagram, prespecified protocol with PROSPERO registration, risk-of-bias assessment with named tool (RoB 2 for RCTs, ROBINS-I for non-randomized, QUADAS-2 for diagnostic accuracy), heterogeneity quantification with I-squared and tau-squared, publication-bias assessment with funnel plot and Egger's test)

• CARE compliance for case reports

• SQUIRE for quality improvement

• STARD 2015 for diagnostic accuracy

• TRIPOD+AI for prediction models

• ARRIVE 2.0 for animal studies

Manuscripts with missing or perfunctory checklists (yes/no boxes without page references, flow diagrams without numbers, registration without prespecified outcomes matching) face desk return with a request to complete the checklist before resubmission, adding 4-8 weeks to the timeline.

The fix is to complete the appropriate checklist with explicit page-and-paragraph references for every item before submission, register prospective studies before enrollment (or include retrospective-registration justification), include the completed checklist as supplementary material at submission, and ensure the flow diagram has actual numbers in every box.

Check reporting standards non compliance at submission where consort 2010 / strobe / p before submitting to European Respiratory Journal →

Mechanistic / causal language that exceeds the study design's evidentiary support

The third recurring pattern in ERJ-targeted manuscripts is mechanistic or causal language in the abstract and discussion that exceeds what the study design can support.

ERJ reviewers (drawn from European academic respiratory-medicine community) specifically check whether:

• causal claims about respiratory disease pathogenesis ("X causes Y" / "X drives Y" / "X is responsible for Y") are supported by experimental evidence (cell / animal / human-tissue model with named perturbation), longitudinal data with appropriate causal-inference design (target-trial emulation, instrumental variable, Mendelian randomization with named instrument validation), or randomized intervention

• pathway claims ("X signals through Y pathway" / "X regulates Z") are supported by named molecular evidence (knockout / knockdown / pharmacological inhibition with named compound, pathway-specific readout, rescue experiment)

• biomarker claims ("X predicts Y" / "X identifies Y patients") are supported by named discovery / validation / clinical-utility design with reported sensitivity / specificity / NPV / PPV / AUROC against named comparator

• treatment-effect claims are supported by RCT evidence or appropriate quasi-experimental design with explicit identification strategy

• mechanistic claims in human observational studies are appropriately hedged ("associated with" rather than "caused by")

Manuscripts that use causal language ("our results demonstrate that X causes Y") with only correlational evidence face revision requests demanding either methodological additions or claim weakening.

The fix is to map every claim in the introduction and discussion to the specific evidence supporting it, weaken claims that the design cannot support, and either add the supporting evidence (mechanistic experiment, longitudinal design, validation cohort) or rewrite to match what the data actually show.

Check whether your ERJ manuscript is submission-ready →

• Clinically interesting but not ERJ-broad. A single-center cohort, local treatment audit, or narrow biomarker analysis can be valuable but still too limited for ERJ unless the wider respiratory implication is explicit.

• Reporting checklist completed too late. CONSORT, STROBE, and PRISMA problems are harder to fix after the manuscript is written. If outcomes, missing-data handling, trial registration, flow diagrams, or eligibility criteria are unclear, the paper looks unfinished even when the result is strong.

• Mechanistic claim exceeds the data. ERJ readers are comfortable with mechanistic respiratory science, but biomarker or pathway language has to match the design. Observational association should not be written as mechanism without supporting experiments or causal evidence.

• ERS Statement pathway misunderstood. A statement-like review or guidance document without ERS task-force engagement can fail for process reasons before the content is evaluated.

• Is European Respiratory Journal a good journal?

• American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine Submission Guide

• Lancet Respiratory Medicine Submission Guide

If your manuscript is already in the portal, use the European Respiratory Journal Under Review status guide to interpret the status window, follow-up threshold, and reviewer-risk preparation while you wait.

Last verified: May 2026 against ERJ editorial pages.