Rejected from Clinical Psychology Review? The 6 Best Journals to Submit Next

Your next target depends on which of the three filters tripped you up, and on what your review is actually about. The shortlist below spans review-friendly venues across publishers, ordered roughly from closest fit to aspirational ceiling.

Source: journal aims-and-scope pages, Elsevier/APA/Wiley/Cambridge author guidelines, and JCR 2024 metrics (accessed June 2026). APCs change; confirm on the journal's open-access page before submitting.

1. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice

If your manuscript is a genuine clinical-psychology review or meta-analysis and CPR rejected it on novelty or fit rather than method, this is the most natural next home. Now published by the American Psychological Association, it specializes in scholarly articles built around narrative and systematic reviews and meta-analyses on assessment, intervention, and service delivery. The 2024 impact factor sits around 4.7, well below CPR, which is the point: a tighter, slightly more specialized review can land here when it was crowded out at the top of the category.

The editorial culture rewards clinical usefulness over comprehensiveness for its own sake. A review that answers a real practice question, with a defensible search, is a strong fit even if it is not the encyclopedic synthesis CPR favors.

Best for: Clinical-psychology reviews and meta-analyses that are rigorous but more focused than a CPR field-defining synthesis.

2. Journal of Affective Disorders

If your review is about depression, anxiety, the mood spectrum, or stress, Journal of Affective Disorders is the highest-volume realistic option, with a 2024 JIF around 4.9. Unlike CPR, it publishes both reviews and primary empirical work across the affective disorders, so a synthesis sits comfortably next to trials and neuroimaging studies. That breadth also means a faster, less bottlenecked decision than a review-only flagship.

The trade-off is topical: the paper has to be squarely about affective disorders. A transdiagnostic CBT-process review or a personality-disorder synthesis is a stretch here.

Best for: Mood, anxiety, and stress reviews or meta-analyses that need a high-volume, faster-turnaround clinical home.

3. Behaviour Research and Therapy

Behaviour Research and Therapy is the right target when your review is about the mechanisms of disorders and their treatment, especially cognitive and behavioral mechanisms. Its focus is an experimental-psychopathology approach to understanding emotional and behavioral disorders and their prevention and treatment, with a 2024 JIF around 4.5. If CPR found your review too mechanism-heavy or too tied to a specific treatment model for its broad readership, BRT is where that emphasis is a strength.

It is selective, and it expects the review to engage with experimental evidence, not just summarize clinical outcomes.

Best for: Reviews of treatment mechanisms, CBT and exposure-based interventions, and experimental psychopathology.

4. Psychological Medicine

Psychological Medicine, published by Cambridge University Press, sits at the psychiatry and clinical-psychology border, with a 2024 JIF around 5.5 and a CiteScore in the low teens. It publishes literature reviews alongside original research, so a clinically serious review with a psychiatric angle can compete here. First decisions are often returned in roughly three to six weeks, which is brisk for a journal at this level.

It is highly selective and leans toward work with clinical and biological reach, so a purely psychotherapeutic-process review may fit less well than at the options above.

Best for: Clinically rigorous reviews with a psychiatric or transdiagnostic angle that need a high-impact, reasonably fast venue.

5. Journal of Clinical Psychology

Journal of Clinical Psychology (Wiley, 2024 JIF around 3.1) is the dependable mid-tier option for clinical-practice-oriented reviews, assessment work, and psychotherapy-process syntheses. It welcomes psychotherapy effectiveness research, psychological assessment and treatment matching, clinical outcomes, and behavioral medicine. If CPR's bar was simply higher than your review's reach, this is a credible landing spot that still carries Q1 standing in its category.

Best for: Practice-facing clinical reviews and assessment or treatment-matching syntheses that need a solid, less bottlenecked home.

6. Psychological Bulletin (aspirational)

Psychological Bulletin is the ceiling, not the consolation. As the APA's flagship review journal, it carries one of the highest impact factors in all of psychology (well above CPR), and it publishes definitive, field-spanning quantitative reviews and meta-analyses. Going here only makes sense if CPR's rejection was about scope being too narrow rather than too broad, and if your synthesis is genuinely comprehensive across an entire literature. Most CPR rejects are not Bulletin material; the ones that are usually knew it before they submitted to CPR.

Best for: The rare review that is more ambitious, more comprehensive, and more methodologically definitive than CPR itself expects.

Before you commit to any of these, a Clinical Psychology Review manuscript fit check can tell you whether the rejection was about scope, method, or redundancy, which is the single fact that decides which row of the table you belong in.

The order you submit in should follow the reason you were rejected, not a blind walk down the impact-factor ladder. This routing table maps the rejection reason to the next move.

Source: Manusights routing framework built from CPR aims-and-scope plus our pre-submission review observations (June 2026).

Rejected because the paper is empirical, not a review. This is the cleanest signal: CPR was never the right journal. Send the empirical manuscript to a primary-research home in its disorder area (Journal of Affective Disorders for mood and anxiety work, Behaviour Research and Therapy for mechanism and treatment trials, Psychological Medicine for clinically serious studies). Do not try to convert a primary study into a review to fit CPR; reviewers see through it.

Rejected on novelty or redundancy, but the review is methodologically sound. Step to a slightly more focused review-friendly venue. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice is the first stop. If the topic is affective, Journal of Affective Disorders. The cascade here is lateral and topical, not strictly down a tier.

Rejected on method (thin search, missing PRISMA, weak meta-analytic models). Do not resubmit anywhere yet. Fix the method first, because every review-led journal on this list applies the same standard. Then target the journal whose scope matches your topic most precisely. A clean systematic review beats a high-impact aim with a shaky search.

Offered an Elsevier transfer. Elsevier runs an article-transfer service, and a CPR editor may suggest a sibling such as Behaviour Research and Therapy or Journal of Affective Disorders. A transfer can carry the manuscript and any reviews across and saves reformatting time. Take it seriously if the suggested journal genuinely fits your topic, but you are free to decline and submit elsewhere.

In our pre-submission review work with Clinical Psychology Review submissions, the rejections we see cluster into a small number of patterns, and almost all of them are visible before an editor ever opens the file. The journal's review-only mandate plus its rigor bar makes these unusually predictable.

This is the editorial culture worth understanding: CPR editors explicitly screen for whether the manuscript is a true synthesis before they assess its findings, and what actually happens to most submissions is a fast desk return on type or method, not a substantive review of the science. The editorial criteria states plainly that the journal publishes reviews and meta-analyses, not primary research, so type-fit is the first gate.

These are the named failure patterns we flag most often.

The empirical-paper-in-a-review-journal error. This is the single most common pattern we flag on manuscripts headed for Clinical Psychology Review. The paper presents new data, a sample, a results section with primary analyses, and a thin literature framing on top. CPR publishes systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and theoretical reviews, not primary studies, so this is a desk return regardless of how strong the data are. We catch it by checking the first move: if the methods describe recruiting participants rather than searching databases, the manuscript is in the wrong building.

The undocumented or stale search strategy. A genuine review with no specified databases, no date range, no inclusion and exclusion criteria, and no PRISMA flow diagram reads as a narrative opinion piece, not a systematic synthesis. CPR asks authors to follow PRISMA and to keep the search current to within three months of submission.

In manuscripts we review for this journal, an out-of-date search (or a search the author cannot reconstruct on request) is the most common method-level reason a real review still gets returned. This one is fully fixable, but only before resubmission, not after a second rejection.

Weak meta-analytic methods and missing risk-of-bias assessment. When a paper claims to be a meta-analysis, CPR reviewers look for the machinery: a stated effect-size metric, a justified model (fixed versus random effects), heterogeneity statistics, sensitivity or subgroup analyses, and a formal risk-of-bias assessment of the included studies.

We regularly see meta-analyses that pool effect sizes but never assess study quality, so a reviewer cannot tell whether the synthesis rests on solid trials or on a pile of underpowered ones. Forest plots without a risk-of-bias table are a recurring red flag in the Clinical Psychology Review submissions we screen.

Redundancy with an existing review. Because CPR papers are cited for years, the journal is protective about publishing a second synthesis of a question already well reviewed. A manuscript that does not, early and explicitly, state what it adds over the most recent prior review on the topic invites a fast rejection. In our reviews, the fix is a short, direct paragraph naming the closest existing reviews and the specific gap, new trials, sharper clinical question, or methodological upgrade, that this paper fills.

Generic clinical implications. A clinical-psychology review has to land somewhere a clinician or researcher can use. Submissions we screen for Clinical Psychology Review often end with a discussion section of generic calls for "more research" rather than concrete, defensible implications for assessment, treatment selection, or service delivery. The references and the discussion are where this surfaces: if the synthesis does not change what a reader does or thinks, the review reads as a summary, not an advance.

Here is the honest part. A Clinical Psychology Review rejection is often not a formatting problem, and treating it as one is how good reviews end up rejected three times in a row.

If you were desk-rejected for being empirical, no amount of reformatting fixes that. Either the paper is a primary study (send it to a primary-research journal) or it can be rebuilt as a true review (which is a months-long project, not a weekend reformat).

If you were rejected on method, the next review-led journal will apply the same PRISMA, search-currency, and risk-of-bias standards CPR did. Resubmitting the same manuscript to Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice or Behaviour Research and Therapy without rerunning the search, adding the flow diagram, and assessing study quality just moves the same rejection to a new address.

If you were rejected on redundancy, the fix is intellectual, not cosmetic: you need a defensible, stated reason your synthesis adds something over the existing reviews. If you cannot articulate that reason in two sentences, a different journal will not save the paper.

It is worth being clear about what each alternative does well and where it falls short. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice does well on review-friendliness and clinical usefulness but falls short on raw prestige relative to CPR. Journal of Affective Disorders does well on speed and volume but falls short the moment your topic drifts outside the mood and anxiety lane.

Behaviour Research and Therapy does well on mechanism-heavy reviews but falls short for purely descriptive or outcome-only syntheses. Psychological Medicine does well on impact and decision speed but falls short for work without a psychiatric or biological angle. None of these is a strictly better CPR; each is a different fit.

The cases where a fast lateral move makes sense are narrow: a sound, current, well-documented review that CPR returned purely on fit or breadth. Those genuinely belong at a more focused review-friendly journal, and you can move quickly. Be honest with yourself about which case you are in before you pick the next target.