Rejected from Environmental Science & Technology? The 7 Best Journals to Submit Next

Source: Clarivate JCR 2024, ACS and Elsevier journal pages and guides for authors (accessed June 2026). APCs are list prices excluding tax and may be reduced at submission.

1. Environmental Science & Technology Letters. This is the ACS sister title built for rigorous, time-sensitive brief communications, and it is the most natural in-portfolio landing spot. Its scope overlaps ES&T almost completely (contaminant fate and transport, treatment and resource recovery, ecotoxicology and public health, energy and climate), so the scope-mismatch risk that sinks cross-publisher moves is low. If the contribution is real but better expressed as a short, high-timeliness result than a full Article, reframe it as a Letter.

2. Water Research. If the work is genuinely about water or wastewater (treatment, reuse, contaminant removal, water-quality processes), this is the cleanest specialist alternative and one of the strongest journals in the field. It rewards mechanism and process insight over occurrence-only data, so a paper that ES&T found too narrow for a broad readership can be exactly right here when the water angle is the real story.

3. Environment International. A good home when the contribution is human exposure, environmental health, or the sources-pathways-sinks chain of pollutants. Its primary criteria are scientific quality and environmental significance, so the same significance argument ES&T wanted still matters, but the relevance test is satisfied by a clear human or population-level health link rather than broad cross-disciplinary reach.

4. Journal of Hazardous Materials. The default destination for contaminant fate, environmental toxicology, remediation technology, and hazardous-substance risk. Reach for it when the hazard interpretation, not the environmental-systems framing, is the core advance, and the manuscript can speak to risk rather than only occurrence.

5. Environmental Pollution. The better fit when the manuscript is fundamentally about a pollutant's occurrence, sources, behavior, and ecological effects. It weighs ecological consequence seriously and suits work where the pollution story, rather than a treatment technology or a broad systems claim, carries the paper.

6. Science of the Total Environment. Reach for STOTEN when the work spans more than one environmental compartment (water plus soil plus air, for example) and the integrative, cross-compartment view is the contribution. Its scope is the broadest on this list, which makes it forgiving of work that does not fit a single-medium specialist title.

7. ACS Environmental Au. The fully gold open-access journal in the ACS environmental family, judged on soundness rather than a broad-interest novelty bar. It is a sensible in-portfolio option when the science is solid, you have OA funding, and the rejection was about general-interest reach rather than rigor.

A note on Chemosphere: authors often consider it as a step down, but Clarivate removed Chemosphere from the Web of Science Core Collection in December 2024 over editorial-quality concerns, so it currently carries no JCR metric and we do not recommend it as a cascade target. Confirm a journal's current indexing before you submit, not its historical reputation.

ACS runs a Manuscript Transfer Service, and a rejecting ES&T editor (working in the journal's ACS Paragon Plus portal) can suggest transferring your manuscript files and submission details to another ACS journal without restarting the whole process. The most common in-portfolio destinations are Environmental Science & Technology Letters (timely brief communications), ES&T Engineering (applied environmental technology), ES&T Water (water-treatment specialty), and ACS Environmental Au (broad gold open access).

You can accept a suggestion, decline it, or ignore it and submit manually anywhere. 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 (chemistry, materials, or analytics with a thin environmental wrapper; narrow consequence; wrong slot in the ACS portfolio)? Do not cascade unchanged. The scope problem follows the paper. Pick the journal whose scope actually matches the work: Water Research, Environment International, Journal of Hazardous Materials, Environmental Pollution, or Science of the Total Environment.

• Rejected for a weak environmental significance argument but sound science? This is the classic in-portfolio transfer or reframing case.

ES&T Letters (as a brief communication) or ACS Environmental Au is the next tier. Accept an ACS transfer here if the suggested journal fits, after you rewrite the significance statement.

• Rejected after review for thin novelty, unrealistic conditions, or weak mechanism? Fix it before resubmitting anywhere. Every serious environmental venue will raise the same point. Carry the revised analysis into the transfer or the manual resubmission.

In our pre-submission review work with Environmental Science & Technology 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 summary-not-argument significance statement. Across our Environmental Science & Technology pre-submission reviews, the single most common desk trigger is an Environmental Significance Statement that restates the abstract instead of arguing consequence. A manuscript writes "we measured X in Y and found Z" where the statement should answer "why does this belong at ES&T rather than a narrower chemistry or water journal, and what does it change for environmental scientists, engineers, or policymakers?"

The fix is two or three sentences that name the broad-relevance payoff explicitly, in the introduction and the abstract, not only in the discussion. This is testable: read your own significance statement and ask whether it makes a relevance argument a busy handling editor could repeat in one line.

Chemistry or materials work wearing an environmental label. A second recurring pattern in the ES&T manuscripts we review is a synthesis, a sensor, or a material characterized in clean buffer, framed in the abstract as environmental but never tested in a realistic matrix. The editorial question at this journal is not "is the chemistry good?" but "does this advance our understanding of an environmental process or solve an environmental problem?"

Reviewers and editors consistently flag the gap between the environmental claim and the supporting evidence. The fix is to move the work into environmentally realistic conditions (relevant pH, ionic strength, competing solutes, real waters) or to reframe the contribution honestly and submit to a chemistry or materials venue.

Lab-only results presented under unrealistic conditions. We see manuscripts whose central treatment, exposure, or fate claim holds only under idealized laboratory settings, then gets framed as field-relevant. ES&T publishes work on natural and engineered systems, so reviewers ask what changes at realistic concentrations, in a complex matrix, or at a scale that matters.

A removal efficiency that collapses in real wastewater, or a fate result obtained only in deionized water, reads as a lab curiosity. Check that every headline environmental claim is supported under conditions a reader would call realistic, or that the limits are stated plainly.

Descriptive occurrence study without a direction-setting advance. The fourth pattern is another monitoring or occurrence paper, technically clean, that adds a data point without new mechanism, systems insight, or problem-level consequence. ES&T wants impactful, direction-setting research, so a competent "we detected this contaminant here" study without a so-what argument is filtered fast regardless of quality.

Read your own abstract and ask: does this change how a reader understands an environmental process or solution pathway, or does it only add another measurement? If it is the latter, a broader-scope venue like Science of the Total Environment, or a sharper reframing, is the right move.

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 ES&T did, and some manuscripts need real work, not a faster next submission. A desk rejection for scope or a thin significance argument is a routing-and-framing problem you can fix by choosing the right journal and rewriting the significance statement.

A post-review rejection for thin novelty, unrealistic conditions, or weak mechanism 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 environmental realism, the manuscript needs results under realistic conditions, or an honest statement of the boundary conditions. Second, if novelty or mechanism was challenged, new analysis (and sometimes new experiments) is the only fix. Appealing is rarely worth it: a scope or novelty rejection is an editorial judgment, not a factual error, and the appeal queue is slower than a clean resubmission to a better-fit journal.