Rejected from IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology? The 7 Best Journals to Submit Next

Source: Clarivate JCR 2024 via journal metric pages and the journals' own author guidance (accessed June 2026). Figures for IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, IEEE Transactions on Communications, and IEEE Access are kept consistent with our other IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology pages.

1. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. The closest neighbor and the natural landing spot when the real contribution is a transportation-system method, traffic-control algorithm, or mobility-and-autonomy system rather than an on-board vehicular electronics or radio result. If a reviewer said your work was "really ITS, not vehicular technology," this is where they were pointing.

2. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Strong when the advance is the wireless method itself (a channel model, MIMO scheme, or PHY/MAC technique) and the vehicular setting is the application rather than the source of the contribution. It rewards depth in the communications theory.

3. IEEE Transactions on Communications. A good home for communications theory that does not need a vehicular setting at all. If your paper survived only by adding a thin V2X wrapper, drop the wrapper and submit the comms contribution here on its own terms.

4. IEEE Internet of Things Journal. The right venue when the framing is connected-vehicle IoT, vehicular edge and fog computing, or sensing-and-data systems. It treats the vehicle as one IoT node among many, which fits work whose contribution is the system architecture or data pipeline.

5. Vehicular Communications. The specialist Elsevier home for V2X and vehicular-networking work. Submit through Elsevier's Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager submission portal, where the system runs a single-anonymized review with at least two independent reviewers. It is more applied and typically faster than the flagship Transactions, and it carries an open-access article processing charge, so factor that into the decision.

6. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles. Reach for this when the core advance is autonomous-driving intelligence, perception, prediction, planning, or control, rather than communications or electronics. It carries the highest bar on this list, so it suits work where the autonomy, not the vehicular radio or powertrain, is the protagonist.

7. IEEE Access. The fast, broad route for technically sound work that needs a venue now. It reviews for soundness rather than novelty, so it fits when a reviewer's only real objection was incremental contribution and the science itself holds up.

Here is the fact that separates an IEEE where-next decision from an Elsevier or Nature one: IEEE has no automatic cross-journal transfer. There is no Article Transfer Service, no Nature Portfolio referral, no one-click step-down ladder. After an IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology rejection you resubmit manually to the next venue, and your files and reviews do not travel with you.

If a reviewer or associate editor named a more suitable IEEE Transactions in the decision letter, treat that as a routing hint worth following, but you still submit fresh and the receiving editor screens the paper from scratch.

That makes the cascade a manual ladder keyed to rejection reason, not a transfer pipe:

• Desk-rejected for weak vehicular framing or scope? Do not step sideways to another vehicular venue unchanged. The framing problem follows the paper.

Either rewrite the abstract and Figure 1 so the vehicular system is the protagonist and resubmit to IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology's true neighbor (IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems for system work), or move the contribution to the venue that owns it (IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Communications, or IEEE Internet of Things Journal).

• Rejected for incremental novelty but sound science? This is the classic step-down case.

IEEE Access or Vehicular Communications is the next tier, and IEEE Access in particular reviews for soundness rather than novelty.

• Rejected after review for simulation-only validation or a missing measurement? Fix it before resubmitting anywhere. Every serious vehicular venue will raise the same point. Add the testbed, the field measurement, or the realism analysis, then carry it into the manual resubmission.

In our pre-submission review work with IEEE Transactions on Vehicular 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 buried vehicular contribution. Across our IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology pre-submission reviews, the single most common desk trigger is a manuscript whose title, abstract, and Figure 1 read as a generic communications, signal-processing, or power-electronics contribution, with the vehicular setting appearing only by section II or III.

Associate editors screen the title-and-abstract pair for explicit naming of the vehicular system (V2X, connected vehicle, in-vehicle network, electric-vehicle powertrain, vehicular channel) and redirect papers without it within a week or two. The fix is testable: rewrite the abstract so the first sentence names the vehicular system and the second names the contribution within it, and make Figure 1 a vehicular-scenario figure rather than a generic block diagram.

Simulation-only evaluation with stripped realism. A second recurring pattern is evaluation built entirely in a simulator (MATLAB, NS-3, Veins, SUMO, CARLA) with operating-regime simplifications that remove vehicular realism: random-waypoint mobility instead of a real SUMO trace, free-space path loss instead of a 3GPP V2X channel, no field measurement or testbed corroboration. Reviewers who are vehicular-systems specialists check whether relaxing any one assumption invalidates the result.

The fix is to ground each modeling assumption in a cited automotive or 3GPP standard, add a sensitivity-to-realism subsection, and corroborate with a measurement or an established vehicular benchmark dataset where one exists.

Incremental novelty in a crowded area. We see manuscripts that apply a familiar method to a vehicular dataset and report a marginal improvement, with no clearly new vehicular-systems contribution. In a category publishing thousands of papers a year, a method plus a dataset plus a small gain is not enough.

Check that your contribution statement names something the field did not already have: a new problem formulation, a constraint that other work ignores, or a result that changes a design decision. If you cannot, the contribution needs sharpening, not just a faster next submission.

Scope mismatch between the communications track and the vehicular-systems track. The fourth pattern is a paper submitted to the wrong lane of the journal's threefold scope: communications theory that belongs in IEEE Transactions on Communications, or a power-electronics or drives result that belongs in a power venue, wearing a vehicular label. The VTS editorial policy states that work not relevant to core vehicular-technology topics may be rejected, with microgrid work called out explicitly.

Read your own abstract and ask whether the vehicular system is the actual protagonist or a wrapper around another field's question. If it is a wrapper, the right move is a different journal, not a resubmission to a sibling vehicular venue.

Don't just resubmit the same file to another vehicular venue. The fastest way to collect a second rejection is to send an unrevised manuscript to a journal that screens for the same thing IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology did, and some manuscripts need real work, not a faster next submission.

A desk rejection for weak framing or scope is a routing problem you can fix by reframing the abstract and Figure 1 and choosing the right lane. A post-review rejection for simulation-only validation or thin novelty is a substance problem, and the same concern 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 validated, the manuscript needs the testbed, the field measurement, or the realism analysis it was missing. Second, if the contribution itself was called incremental, the fix is a sharper problem formulation or a new result, sometimes new experiments, not a venue change.

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.