Rejected from European Respiratory Journal? The 7 Best Journals to Submit Next

Source: ERS, ATS, BTS, ACCP, Wiley, BMC, and Lancet journal pages and guides for authors, plus Clarivate JCR 2024 (accessed June 2026). Publishing-model and turnaround details are list-level and may change at submission.

1. ERJ Open Research. This is the ERS open-access sister title and the most natural landing spot for technically sound respiratory work that did not clear the flagship's priority bar. It sits in the same publications portfolio as ERJ, so the topical fit is essentially identical, which removes the scope-mismatch risk that sinks cross-society moves. It is fully gold open access, so factor the APC into the decision, but transferred manuscripts have historically been accepted at a higher rate than spontaneous ones.

2. American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (AJRCCM). The ATS flagship is the aspirational counterpart to ERJ. If ERJ rejected your paper on priority rather than fit and the clinical contribution is strong, AJRCCM's editorial team has deep expertise across respiratory, critical care, and sleep medicine. Its desk bar is comparably high, and a US-anchored editorial perspective may value aspects ERJ did not prioritize.

3. Thorax. The British Thoracic Society journal occupies a strong broad-respiratory position and is receptive to clinical respiratory research with a practice angle, including real-world registry outcomes. For papers ERJ judged "not competitive enough" where the science is sound, Thorax is a well-regarded destination one step below the two flagships.

4. Chest. The American College of Chest Physicians journal is the better fit when the manuscript is fundamentally a chest-medicine, critical-care, or sleep question rather than a narrowly European respiratory one. It rewards multidisciplinary clinical work and runs a steady review cadence.

5. Respiratory Research. Reach for this when the core contribution is mechanistic or translational respiratory biology, or when open access is a priority. It evaluates work on scientific contribution across clinical and basic respiratory disease rather than on direct clinical-practice consequence, which suits papers where the mechanism, not the management decision, is the protagonist.

6. Respirology. The Asia-Pacific Society of Respirology journal is a good home for broad respiratory research that is sound but did not clear the European flagship bar. It approves a notable share of submissions for external review and frames general respiratory contributions well for a wide clinical readership.

7. Lancet Respiratory Medicine. Reach for this only when the core advance is a practice-changing trial, a major interventional result, or respiratory health policy. It is the most competitive title on this list, and the bar is correspondingly high, so it suits work where the trial or the policy consequence, not the bench detail, is the story.

ERJ sits inside the ERS publications portfolio, and a rejecting European Respiratory Journal editor (working in ERJ Manuscript Central at ScholarOne submission portal) can offer a transfer that carries your manuscript files, and often the reviewer reports, to ERJ Open Research. Editors may also point review-type work toward European Respiratory Review.

The transfer preserves peer review, which saves weeks, and transferred manuscripts have historically been accepted at ERJ Open Research at a higher rate than spontaneous submissions. You can accept, decline, or ignore the offer and submit manually. 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 fit (too local, descriptive, narrow subspecialty, or a statement-style manuscript sent through the article route)? Do not cascade down the same family unchanged. The fit problem follows the paper. Pick the journal whose scope actually matches the work: Thorax, Chest, Respiratory Research, or Respirology, depending on whether the center of gravity is clinical, mechanistic, or regional.

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

ERJ Open Research is the in-family next tier; accept an ERS transfer offer here if the destination fits. If you want a higher-tier reach first, the next venue is AJRCCM (different editorial perspective) before stepping down.

• Rejected after review for single-center generalizability, reporting-standard gaps, or thin clinical consequence? Fix it before resubmitting anywhere. Every serious respiratory venue will raise the same point.

Carry the revised analysis and reporting checklist into the transfer or the manual resubmission.

In our pre-submission review work with European Respiratory Journal manuscripts, the rejections we see most often cluster into four named rejection patterns. Each is journal-specific and testable against your own manuscript, which is what makes them worth checking before you resubmit anywhere. They also reflect ERJ's editorial culture: the journal publishes ERS clinical statements, so its desk screen weighs broad respiratory consequence and reporting discipline more heavily than raw novelty. In our review of European Respiratory Journal submissions, the same four patterns surface across most desk rejections.

Single-center work framed as practice-changing. Across our European Respiratory Journal pre-submission reviews, the most common reviewer trigger is a single-site cohort or case series whose abstract and discussion claim broad management consequence the data cannot carry. ERJ publishes for a global respiratory readership beyond its European Respiratory Society base, so reviewers ask whether the result travels: would a clinician at another center change practice on this evidence?

The fix is to bound the claim to what the design supports, add a candid external-validity paragraph, or recruit a multi-center confirmation before submission. This is testable: read your own abstract and ask whether the conclusion would survive if a reader knew it came from one site.

Insufficient clinical consequence for a broad ERJ screen. A second recurring pattern in the European Respiratory Journal manuscripts we review is a competent respiratory study whose result confirms existing practice or reports an association the field already recognizes, with a discussion that ends on "further studies are warranted" rather than a decision implication. The editorial question at this journal is not "is this a sound respiratory study?"

but "does this change diagnosis, treatment, prognosis, prevention, or research direction?" Reviewers consistently flag the gap between a clean result and a flat conclusion. State the specific clinical or mechanistic decision your finding affects, or reframe the contribution honestly as a mechanistic or descriptive advance for a different venue.

Reporting-standard and statistical gaps. We see manuscripts where the central claim rests on a clinical trial without a CONSORT flow diagram, an observational study without STROBE alignment, a systematic review without PRISMA, post-hoc endpoints presented without disclosure, or subgroup analyses presented as primary findings. ERJ checks reporting checklists and trial registration at the desk and returns under-reported studies before peer review. Check that the reporting standard appropriate to your design is complete, that endpoints match the registration, and that the statistical method fits the data structure.

Scope drift, or a statement-style manuscript on the wrong route. The fourth pattern is a paper whose true center of gravity is general internal medicine, basic immunology, or a narrow local audit wearing a respiratory label, or an ERS Statement or guidance-style document pushed through the normal article channel. ERJ runs the ERS Statements process separately through task-force structures, and it redirects work that is not broad respiratory medicine.

When the manuscript's real protagonist is one of those, the desk filter removes it fast, regardless of quality. Read your own abstract and ask: is a broad respiratory-medicine contribution the actual protagonist, or a wrapper around a different field's question or a misrouted article type?

Two practical notes that shape whether your resubmission clears. First, ERJ Original Articles run to about 3,500 words with up to six display items, so a manuscript that overruns the next journal's limit reads as a recycled submission; trim to the target venue's length before you upload.

Second, ERJ values a tight evidence-to-consequence link, the same pattern visible in recent ERJ work such as its 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 cite these not as templates to copy but as examples of the connection between respiratory evidence and a clinical or mechanistic decision that the desk screen rewards.

SciRev community data for ERJ-class respiratory journals shows desk decisions typically within 1 to 2 weeks and post-review first decisions within several weeks, consistent with the fast editorial cadence the ERS maintains for its flagship.

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 ERJ did, and some manuscripts need real work, not a faster next submission. A desk rejection for fit is a routing problem you can fix by choosing the right journal and reformatting to its template.

A post-review rejection for single-center generalizability, reporting gaps, or thin clinical consequence is a substance problem, and the same reviewers' 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 is broadly meaningful, the manuscript needs the external-validity discussion, the bounded claim, or the multi-center confirmation it was missing. Second, if the reporting checklist or statistics were challenged, new analysis (and sometimes new reporting artifacts) is the only fix.

Appealing is rarely worth it: a fit, priority, or scope rejection is an editorial judgment, not a factual error, and the appeal queue is slower than a clean resubmission to a better-fit journal.