Rejected from Clinical Infectious Diseases? The 7 Best Journals to Submit Next

Source: Clarivate JCR 2024, Oxford Academic, ESCMID, Springer, and the journals' own author guidelines (accessed June 2026). Open-access status noted where relevant; APCs are set per journal and may be waived.

1. Open Forum Infectious Diseases (OFID). This is the in-house IDSA open-access sister title and the most natural landing spot for technically sound clinical work that did not clear the flagship's priority bar. It exists explicitly to give CID-quality work a rapid publication route and accepts transfers directly from CID, so the topical fit is essentially identical, which removes the scope-mismatch risk that sinks cross-society moves. Factor the open-access APC into the decision.

2. Journal of Infectious Diseases (JID). If your work is really about pathogenesis, host immune response, microbial biology, or translational mechanism rather than bedside management, this is the journal CID itself redirects that work to. The fit is strongest when the contribution is mechanistic, not clinical-decision-making.

3. Clinical Microbiology and Infection (CMI). The cleanest specialist alternative when the contribution is a diagnostic assay, an antimicrobial-resistance finding, or a clinical-microbiology question. CMI rewards work that helps physicians and clinical microbiologists manage patients and assess new diagnostics, so it fits diagnostics-led manuscripts that read as borderline-clinical at CID.

4. International Journal of Infectious Diseases (IJID). A good home when the real contribution is epidemiology, control, or outbreak surveillance, with particular openness to diseases common in lower-resource settings. If your study is population-level rather than individual-patient management, IJID frames it well.

5. Infection. Fits broad clinical ID work that spans etiology, diagnosis, and treatment and touches public-health implications. It is a sensible mid-tier clinical venue when the manuscript is solid and clinically relevant but not framed around a single practice-changing decision.

6. BMC Infectious Diseases. The sound-science open-access option: it judges whether the work is methodologically rigorous and adds to the literature, not whether it clears a general-interest priority bar. Reach for it when the science is defensible but the clinical-priority argument is what CID rejected. It is fully open access, so budget the article-processing charge (list price $3,090 / £2,490 / €2,690, with country-tiered and waiver options) into the decision.

7. Lancet Infectious Diseases. Reach for this only when the core finding is genuinely practice-changing at a global or public-health scale. The bar is the highest on this list and the volume is small, so it suits work where the clinical or policy consequence, not the dataset, is the protagonist.

CID runs an IDSA portfolio transfer route, and a rejecting CID editor can offer a one-click transfer that carries your manuscript files, and your reviewer reports if you consent, to a more suitable IDSA journal, most often Open Forum Infectious Diseases, the Journal of Infectious Diseases, or the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society. The receiving journal may seek additional peer review rather than accepting the prior reports as final.

You can accept the transfer, decline it, or ignore the offer and submit manually elsewhere. A transfer offer is a routing suggestion, not a quality endorsement, so treat the destination as you would any other target.

Practical ladder by rejection reason:

• Desk-rejected for scope or clinical priority (basic mechanism, in vitro-only, animal-only, narrow audit)? Do not cascade unchanged into a journal that screens the same way. Pick the journal whose scope actually matches the work: the Journal of Infectious Diseases for mechanism, Clinical Microbiology and Infection for diagnostics, the International Journal of Infectious Diseases for epidemiology.

• Rejected for lower priority but sound clinical science? This is the classic transfer or step-down case.

Open Forum Infectious Diseases is the native next tier, and accepting the IDSA transfer offer here keeps your reviewer history intact. BMC Infectious Diseases is the alternative if you want a sound-science OA home with no general-interest bar.

• Rejected after review for limited generalizability, a weak clinical-significance claim, or reporting gaps? Fix it before resubmitting anywhere. Every serious clinical-ID venue will raise the same point.

Carry the revised analysis into the transfer or the manual resubmission.

If you decline the transfer and resubmit manually, remember that CID's own format is a starting template, not a universal one. A CID Major Article runs up to 3,500 words of body text with a 200-word structured abstract (Background, Methods, Results, Conclusions) and up to six combined figures and tables, submitted through the journal's Editorial Manager portal at Editorial Manager submission portal. The next journal almost certainly sets different limits, so reformat to its template before you resubmit rather than carrying CID's structure across unchanged.

In our pre-submission review work with Clinical Infectious Diseases manuscripts, the rejections we see most often cluster into four named patterns. Each is journal-specific and testable against your own manuscript, which is what makes them worth checking before you resubmit anywhere.

The missing clinical-significance claim. Across our Clinical Infectious Diseases pre-submission reviews, the single most common reviewer trigger is a result that never states the clinical decision it would change. A manuscript reports a difference in outcome or a new association but never names the diagnosis, treatment, prevention, or stewardship choice a clinician would make differently because of it.

CID editors are reading for bedside or health-system consequence, so the abstract and introduction must say, in plain terms, what changes. Add one or two sentences that name the practice decision and tie the primary endpoint to it, and a borderline paper often clears the desk. Without it, even a clean dataset reads as a finding in search of an application.

This is testable: read your own abstract and ask whether a clinician could state, in one sentence, what they would do differently.

Single-center data presented as a general recommendation. A second recurring pattern in the CID manuscripts we review is a single-institution retrospective cohort, framed in the discussion as a broad clinical recommendation, with no analysis of external validity. The editorial question at this journal is not "what happened at your hospital?" but "does this generalize to my patients?" Reviewers consistently flag the gap between the population studied and the claim made.

The fix is an honest external-validity paragraph, a sensitivity analysis across subgroups, or a reframing of the contribution as hypothesis-generating rather than practice-defining.

Insufficient power and mismatched statistics. We see manuscripts where the central clinical claim rests on an underpowered sample, with no sample-size justification and a statistical test that does not match the study design, for example an unadjusted comparison where confounding by indication is obvious. A clinical claim needs a defensible sample size, the right adjustment for the design, and effect sizes with confidence intervals rather than bare p-values.

CID editors screen for under-powered, under-adjusted clinical studies early, and reviewers reject when the analysis cannot distinguish the reported effect from chance or confounding. Check that every headline claim has a matched comparator and an analysis appropriate to your data structure.

Incomplete reporting checklists and scope drift toward basic science. The fourth pattern is twofold. First, a clinical manuscript that omits or only gestures at the relevant reporting checklist (CONSORT for trials, STROBE for observational work, PRISMA for reviews) signals a rushed submission and is caught at the desk.

Second, a paper whose true center of gravity is microbiology mechanism, in vitro susceptibility, or animal-model biology wearing a clinical label belongs at the Journal of Infectious Diseases, and CID's desk filter redirects it fast regardless of quality. Read your own methods and ask: is the reporting checklist complete, and is patient-care relevance the actual protagonist, or a wrapper around a basic-science question?

If it is a wrapper, the right move is a different journal, not a resubmission.

Don't just resubmit the same file down the ladder. The fastest way to collect a second rejection is to send an unrevised manuscript to a journal that screens for the same thing CID did, and some manuscripts need real work, not a faster next submission. A desk rejection for scope or clinical priority is a routing problem you can fix by choosing the right journal and reformatting to its template.

A post-review rejection for limited generalizability, a weak clinical-significance claim, or reporting gaps is a substance problem, and the same concerns will reappear at any serious venue. Be honest about which one you got.

Two cases call for real work before resubmitting, not a faster next submission. First, if reviewers questioned whether the result generalizes or whether it changes practice, the manuscript needs the external-validity analysis and the clinical-decision framing it was missing. Second, if the power or statistics were challenged, new analysis, and sometimes new data, is the only fix. Appealing is rarely worth it: a scope or clinical-priority rejection is an editorial judgment, not a factual error, and the appeal queue is slower than a clean resubmission to a better-fit journal.