Rejected from Construction and Building Materials? The 6 Best Journals to Submit Next

The shortlist below is ordered from closest-fit to aspirational. All but one are Elsevier titles, which matters because Construction and Building Materials can transfer your manuscript and reviews to them directly (see the cascade section).

Source: Elsevier and Springer journal pages, JCR 2024, and ScienceDirect open-access information (accessed June 2026). APC figures vary by agreement and country.

The cleanest move after a Construction and Building Materials rejection is to use Elsevier's own plumbing rather than start cold somewhere else. Construction and Building Materials participates in the Elsevier Article Transfer Service (ATS), which lets an editor forward your manuscript, files, and any review comments to a more suitable Elsevier journal. Transferred articles move from submission to acceptance about ten days faster than fresh submissions, and a transfer offer is a strong signal that the work is publishable, just not here.

Think of it as a tier ladder anchored to why you were rejected:

• Tier 1 (first choice was CBM): if the editor offers a transfer, take it seriously. The most common ATS destinations from Construction and Building Materials are Case Studies in Construction Materials (for applied, field-validated work) and Developments in the Built Environment (for sound civil-engineering science). Both are gold open access, so factor the APC into the decision.

• Tier 2 (no transfer offered, scope was the problem): submit to Journal of Building Engineering.

It is the broadest Elsevier sibling and absorbs building-scale work that Construction and Building Materials considered too applied, too system-level, or too far from pure material characterization.

• Tier 3 (novelty was the problem, but the cement science is real): step up to Cement and Concrete Composites, or aspirationally Cement and Concrete Research.

These reward fundamental mechanism and microstructure depth that a broad applied journal does not have room to publish.

• Off-ramp (fundamental properties, not construction practice): Materials and Structures (RILEM) is the non-Elsevier choice. It is the flagship of the RILEM community and values rigorous property characterization over construction-deployment framing.

The table below maps the rejection reason to the right move so you do not waste a cycle:

Source: Manusights pre-submission review routing, mapped to Elsevier and Springer journal scopes (June 2026).

A transfer is not automatic. If you decline or no offer comes, you submit fresh to the next-tier journal, and you can revise the paper using the reviews you already received before doing so. That revision step is where most authors leave value on the table.

In our pre-submission review work with Construction and Building Materials submissions, the rejections we see cluster into four named patterns. Construction and Building Materials editors screen every submission for construction relevance and characterization depth before any reviewer sees it, so the desk-rejection triggers below are the ones to clear first. Knowing which one applies to your paper decides whether you move journals, revise first, or do both.

The "pure materials science with a thin construction angle" desk rejection. This is the single most common Construction and Building Materials desk rejection we see. The journal is explicit that it does not consider papers focused on materials chemistry, geotechnics, or structural engineering on their own.

A manuscript that characterizes a new polymer, geopolymer, or nanomaterial in detail but only gestures at construction use in the discussion reads as out of scope to the editor in under five minutes. In our review of these submissions, the fix is rarely the science, it is the framing: the bridge from material behavior to a construction service condition (durability, load, weathering, in-situ performance) has to be demonstrated with data, not asserted.

If you cannot add that bridge, the paper belongs at a pure-materials venue, not a CBM sibling.

Insufficient mechanism or characterization data. Construction and Building Materials reviewers consistently flag papers that report a performance result (higher strength, better durability) without the characterization that explains why. A compressive-strength table with no microstructural evidence (no SEM, XRD, porosity, or hydration analysis) gives reviewers nothing to evaluate beyond the headline number.

We see this pattern most in submissions reporting a single mix-design improvement, where the methods section describes what was made but not the controls that isolate the effect. Add the mechanism data before you resubmit anywhere, because the same gap will surface at Cement and Concrete Composites and Materials and Structures, where the characterization bar is higher than at Construction and Building Materials, not lower.

Incremental novelty against a crowded literature. Construction and Building Materials has indexed more than 42,000 papers over its run (per Scopus), so editors are acutely sensitive to mix-design variations that read as the next entry in a long series (another supplementary cementitious material at another replacement ratio, another fiber at another dosage).

In the submissions we review, the papers that clear this bar state the specific gap in the existing body of work in the introduction and show a result that the prior studies could not. If your contribution is a careful but predictable extension, Developments in the Built Environment or Case Studies in Construction Materials are more receptive to solid, application-grounded work than a journal trying to lift its citation profile.

Presentation and English that obscure the result. A meaningful share of Construction and Building Materials rejections we review are not about the science at all. Figures with unreadable axis labels, mix proportions buried in prose instead of a clear table, statistical analysis that does not report variance or sample size, and reference lists that miss the obvious recent comparators all push an otherwise-publishable paper toward rejection.

Reviewers reading their fourth manuscript of the week will not reconstruct your argument for you. Before resubmitting, make the central result legible from the figures and the methods reproducible from the table.

These four cover the large majority of Construction and Building Materials rejections we encounter in pre-submission review. Of the construction-materials manuscripts we pre-screen, the scope-and-bridge pattern and the characterization gap together drive most of the desk-stage outcomes, consistent with the journal's ~35 to 40 percent desk-rejection rate in JCR and SciRev community data. The first pattern sends you to a different journal; the other three are fixable before you resubmit, and fixing them raises your odds at every venue in the cascade.

Do not just blast the same PDF down the ladder. The most common mistake we see after a Construction and Building Materials rejection is treating it as a formatting problem when it was a substance problem. If the rejection named a scope mismatch, a different journal solves it. If it named insufficient mechanism, missing controls, or weak durability testing, the next journal's reviewers will raise the same issue, and you will have burned weeks for a second rejection.

Be honest about which category you are in. A scope desk rejection can be resubmitted elsewhere the same day. A post-review rejection for methodology needs real work first, often new characterization runs or added control conditions, and that takes weeks, not hours. Appealing is almost never the right move unless a reviewer made a factual error you can document. And if the contribution really is a predictable mix-design increment, accept that a slightly less selective, application-friendly venue is the rational home rather than fighting for a top-tier slot.

Run a Construction and Building Materials manuscript fit check before you pick the next journal, so you route the paper by its actual problem instead of guessing.