Rejected from Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews? Where to Submit Next

Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews participates in Elsevier's Article Transfer Service. If the handling editor judges that your work is sound but better suited elsewhere, you may receive an emailed transfer offer that lets you move the manuscript and its files to a suggested Elsevier energy journal without re-uploading. Transferred articles reach acceptance about ten days faster on average than fresh submissions. The offer is editor-initiated, so do not count on it; if it arrives, weigh the suggested journal against your own shortlist rather than accepting reflexively.

When there is no transfer offer, cascade by article type:

• Genuine critical review, rejected on novelty or "another review is not needed now" routes to Renewable and Sustainable Energy Transition or Energy Conversion and Management, both of which accept review-heavy work without the review-only constraint.

• Original research mislabeled or misread as a review routes to a research-first venue: Applied Energy for systems and modeling, Renewable Energy for technology and resource studies, Energy Conversion and Management for conversion and storage work.

• Sound but narrower or more applied work routes down to Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments or, for fast sound-science publication, Energy Reports.

Run the RSER alternative-journal fit scan to see which branch your manuscript actually fits before you commit to the next submission.

In our pre-submission review work with Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews submissions, the rejections we see most often cluster into a small number of recurring, testable failure modes. These are named failure patterns we observe across our pre-submission reviews of review-led energy manuscripts, not generic advice. Because RSER is a review-only journal, the patterns are different from those at a general research outlet, and most are visible before you ever submit.

Article-type mismatch: original research sent to a review-only venue. This is the single most common pattern we see in manuscripts targeting Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews. The journal publishes review papers, technology analyses set against existing literature, and original studies only when they carry a significant review component such as a critique, comparison, or analysis.

A clean experimental or modeling study with a short related-work section is not a review article, and RSER editors desk-reject it on article type before assessing the science. The test: open your introduction and ask whether the manuscript's contribution is new primary data or new synthesis of the field. If it is primary data, RSER is the wrong journal, not a quality problem.

Descriptive coverage instead of critical synthesis. The second pattern is a review that catalogs the literature without integrating it. We repeatedly see RSER manuscripts that count and tabulate studies, technologies, or country cases but do not engage with the contradictions, gaps, and unresolved questions across that body of work. RSER's stated mission is critical thinking, not coverage. A review that reads as an annotated bibliography fails here.

The test: in your discussion section, can a reader point to at least one claim that no single cited paper makes on its own, a synthesis-level conclusion that only emerges from comparing the sources? If not, the review is descriptive.

Weak justification for why this review is needed now. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews editors expect a clear statement of the gap the review fills relative to existing reviews on the same topic. We see manuscripts rejected because the introduction never establishes why a new synthesis is warranted when several recent reviews already cover the area. The test: your introduction should name the most recent reviews in the space and state, in one or two sentences, what they missed that yours delivers.

Methodology gaps in systematic and meta-analytic reviews. When a manuscript claims to be a systematic review, RSER reviewers check the method as rigorously as they would check experimental controls. Missing or vague search strategies, absent inclusion and exclusion criteria, no screening flow, and no quality appraisal of the included studies are common reasons for rejection. The test: if your methods section does not let a reader reproduce your literature search and selection, the systematic-review claim will not survive review.

Thin or dated reference comprehensiveness. Because RSER is a review journal, the reference list is part of the contribution, not a formality. We see rejections where the coverage is incomplete, leans on older work, or omits the most-cited recent papers in the subfield. A review that a specialist reads and immediately notices missing key references loses credibility at the desk. The test: cross-check your reference list against the last two years of high-impact energy-journal output in your exact topic; gaps there are gaps reviewers will flag.

What to do in the next 48 hours: diagnose the rejection type before you touch the manuscript, because the fix for a scope or synthesis rejection is nothing like the fix for a clean article-type rejection. This section was reviewed against the journal's own ScienceDirect scope statement and Elsevier's Article Transfer Service documentation; the sources used are listed at the end. Do not just blast the same manuscript down the ladder.

A review-journal rejection rewards diagnosis more than speed. The honest friction here is specific to review articles: if RSER rejected you for descriptive coverage or weak synthesis, the same critique will follow the manuscript to every serious energy journal, because synthesis quality is not a formatting problem you can fix in an afternoon. It needs real rewriting of the discussion to surface conclusions the individual sources do not state.

The one case where you can move quickly is a clean article-type rejection: if your paper is original research and RSER said so, the science may be fully publishable as-is at Applied Energy, Renewable Energy, or Energy Conversion and Management, and the only real work is reframing the introduction and abstract away from review language. If reviewers raised methodology gaps in a systematic review, fix the search-strategy and quality-appraisal reporting before you submit anywhere, because every methodologically serious venue will check it.

Appeal only if you can point to a factual error in the assessment. For scope and article-type calls, a better-fit resubmission beats an appeal almost every time.