European Respiratory Review

About European Respiratory Review

European Respiratory Review: Journal Profile

The European Respiratory Review (ERR) is an open access review journal published by the European Respiratory Society (ERS). Its print ISSN is 0905-9180 and its online ISSN is 1600-0617, with the print ISSN serving as the linking ISSN for the title. The ERS describes the journal as providing an update on medicine, science and surgery for respiratory professionals. Unlike a primary-research journal, the Review is built around synthesis: it carries state-of-the-art review articles, editorials and correspondence, together with summaries of the most important recent research findings and published studies. For a clinician or researcher who needs an authoritative, peer-reviewed overview of where a respiratory topic now stands — rather than a single new dataset — this is the ERS title designed for exactly that purpose.

Articles are published continuously online and then collected into quarterly issues in one volume per year. The journal homepage lists Rory E. Morty as Chief Editor and displays a Journal Impact Factor of 10.8. The JournalsWorld record for this post, matched by ISSN, places the journal in the first quartile (Q1) in Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine in the SCImago 2025 dataset, with an SJR of 3.57 and an h-index of 115, and lists coverage running from 1992 to 2002 and from 2004 to the present. Each of those figures is attributed in this profile to the dataset that produced it, because citation databases count differently and their headline numbers are not interchangeable.

At a Glance

What Kind of Journal Is This?

The most important thing to understand about the European Respiratory Review is the division of labour inside the ERS journal family. The society's flagship, the European Respiratory Journal, is primarily a venue for original clinical and experimental research. The Review, by contrast, exists to interpret, summarise and teach. Its articles take a field — a disease, a mechanism, a treatment class, a diagnostic problem — and give the reader a structured, referenced account of what is known, what has changed recently, and where the open questions lie. Editorials and correspondence sit alongside the reviews, and the journal also publishes summaries that draw attention to important recent research findings and published studies, which makes individual issues useful as a current-awareness tool as well as a reference source.

That editorial identity shapes everything else about the journal. Review articles are typically longer and more heavily referenced than original papers, they are read for years rather than months, and they accumulate citations steadily — one reason a review journal can sustain a high impact factor without publishing large volumes of new trials. It also shapes who should submit: the ERS author instructions treat reviews, series and mini-reviews as the core article types, and the charges table reproduced below shows that specially commissioned editorials and reviews are treated differently from unsolicited material. Prospective authors should therefore read the journal as an invited-and-proposed review venue first, and check the current author instructions before assuming that an unsolicited manuscript of any type will be considered.

The journal is published in English and is aimed at respiratory professionals internationally, not only in Europe. The society behind it, the European Respiratory Society, is an international medical organisation for respiratory health, and its journals are published through its publishing operation; the DOAJ record for this title lists the publisher country as GB, while the JournalsWorld record lists Switzerland, where the society is based. Both attributions are reported here as their sources give them, and readers verifying the publisher address should rely on the ERS's own journal pages, which are the authoritative source for the title.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The ERS's own journal listing names the topic areas that recur across the Review: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, pulmonary hypertension, interstitial lung disease, lung cancer, tuberculosis and pulmonary infections. That list is a fair map of the journal's centre of gravity, but the published content runs wider. Recent issues fetched for this profile included reviews on inflammasome biology in respiratory disease, defective alveolar regeneration in emphysema, iron metabolism in pulmonary disease, closed-loop oxygen control in hospitalised adults, dipeptidyl peptidase 1 inhibition in bronchiectasis, obstructive sleep apnoea and nocturnal blood pressure, cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator modulators in pregnancy, neonatal continuous positive airway pressure interfaces, and the respiratory effects of opioids and stimulants. Taken together, those titles show the journal operating across basic mechanisms, translational science, clinical management, physiology, paediatric and neonatal respiratory care, sleep medicine and public-health-relevant topics.

Several scope points follow from that pattern. First, the journal is comfortable with mechanism-to-clinic reviews: a paper may begin with cellular pathways and end with therapeutic implications, and that arc is characteristic rather than exceptional. Second, systematic reviews and meta-analyses appear alongside narrative state-of-the-art reviews, so evidence-synthesis methods are within scope when the question is clinical. Third, the journal serves practising clinicians as much as laboratory researchers — reviews are written to update practice, and topics such as oxygen delivery strategies or neonatal interfaces are chosen because they change what happens at the bedside. Fourth, series and mini-reviews allow narrower or faster-moving topics to be covered in shorter formats. A topic is a plausible fit for the Review if a respiratory readership would benefit from an expert synthesis of it; a single-centre original dataset, by contrast, normally belongs in a primary-research journal in the same family or elsewhere.

In classification terms, the JournalsWorld record assigns the journal to Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine, where SCImago 2025 places it in Q1. OpenAlex, checked directly for this profile, associates the title with topics including COPD research, asthma and respiratory diseases, interstitial lung diseases and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, pulmonary hypertension, and respiratory support and mechanisms — a topic map that agrees closely with the publisher's own description, which is a useful consistency check on the journal's identity.

History and Publication Pattern

The JournalsWorld record lists the journal's coverage as 1992–2002 and 2004 onwards, which reflects the title's long publishing history and an interruption in the indexed coverage in the early 2000s rather than the journal ceasing to exist as a society publication. The DOAJ record gives an open access start year of 2013 for the title as listed there. The journal's modern pattern is continuous online publication: articles appear when ready, carry DOIs built on the online ISSN (the 10.1183/16000617 prefix visible in current article DOIs), and are then gathered into quarterly issues. Volume numbering in current content runs to volume 35, consistent with a title that has published a volume a year over more than three decades.

Continuity matters for readers in two practical ways. First, the back archive is deep: a review search on a respiratory topic can legitimately surface ERR articles across many years, and older reviews remain part of the citable record even where later reviews have updated them. Second, because the journal's role is synthesis, its archive functions as a layered history of the field — successive reviews on COPD, interstitial lung disease or pulmonary hypertension show how consensus moved. Researchers doing systematic literature work should treat the Review as a source for background, definitions and prior synthesis, and should always check whether a newer review in the same journal has superseded an older one on the same question.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

The journal homepage names Rory E. Morty as Chief Editor. Editorial leadership of society review journals typically combines a chief editor, associate and section editors drawn from the specialty, and the society's in-house editorial office, which manages peer review and production. The ERS author instructions for the Review set out the article types, formatting and charges, and submissions are handled through the publisher's manuscript system linked from the journal pages. As with all ERS journals, published articles are peer reviewed; review content is additionally shaped editorially, because a review journal's quality depends as much on topic selection and author expertise as on referee reports.

One detail in the ERS instructions deserves emphasis because it affects cost and expectations: the society states that it imposes a publishing charge for articles in the Review other than specially commissioned editorials and reviews, and correspondence written in response to a published article. In other words, commissioned content — which forms a large share of a review journal — is treated separately from unsolicited submissions. Authors who are invited to write should confirm the terms in their invitation, and authors proposing unsolicited reviews should confirm both that the topic is wanted and which charge, if any, will apply, before writing the full manuscript.

Open Access, Licensing and Charges

The European Respiratory Review is an open access journal: its articles are free to read on the publisher's platform. The DOAJ record, checked directly through the DOAJ search API for both ISSNs for this profile, confirms the listing and records two licence options, CC BY and CC BY-NC, with a maximum article processing charge of EUR 3,640, which corresponds to the CC BY licence rate in the publisher's charges table.

The ERS's own charges table for the Review is more granular, and it is reproduced here because the single maximum figure in aggregator records is misleading on its own. For articles submitted from 1 April 2026, the CC BY-NC rates are: reviews, series and mini-reviews EUR 1,465 at the standard price, EUR 1,245 where the corresponding author is an ERS member, EUR 733 for Research4Life Group B countries, and free for Research4Life Group A countries; correspondence (other than in response to a published article), editorials and viewpoints EUR 760 standard, EUR 646 for members, EUR 380 for Group B, and free for Group A. The CC BY licence rate is EUR 3,640. The corresponding rates for the preceding year (submissions between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026) were slightly lower for reviews (EUR 1,395 standard), with the CC BY rate unchanged at EUR 3,640.

Two further mechanisms can reduce or remove the charge. ERS members receive a discounted standard price, as the table shows. Separately, the ERS has entered read-and-publish agreements with institutions and groups of institutions under which eligible authors can publish open access at no extra charge; the society maintains a page listing participating institutions, which has included university and national consortia arrangements. Eligibility depends on the corresponding author's institution and the agreement's dates, so authors should check the society's institutional open access agreements page at submission time rather than relying on any summary, including this one, because agreements start and expire on their own schedules.

Metrics and Standing — Read With Attribution

The journal homepage displays an Impact Factor of 10.8. That is the publisher-displayed figure at the time this profile was researched, and it is consistent with the figure carried by journal-metrics aggregators reporting the June 2026 Journal Citation Reports release. An impact factor in double figures puts the Review among the most cited titles in respiratory medicine, which is a notable position for a journal that publishes reviews rather than original trials — it reflects how heavily the field cites good synthesis.

The SCImago figures in the JournalsWorld record tell the same story from Scopus data: SJR 3.57, h-index 115, Q1 in Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine in the 2025 dataset, with 130 documents and 3,698 citations reported across the latest three-year window in that record. OpenAlex, checked directly for this profile, counts 1,804 works and 80,142 citations for the title, with an OpenAlex h-index of 135 and a two-year mean citedness of about 10.78. The OpenAlex h-index is higher than the Scopus-based figure because OpenAlex counts a broader set of citing sources; neither number is wrong, but they must not be mixed in a single comparison. Where a figure matters — for a tenure file, a library decision or a submission choice — cite the database and the year alongside the number, as this profile does.

Aggregator pages also report a Scopus CiteScore for the title, but the values in circulation differ between aggregator snapshots, so no single CiteScore is asserted here; readers who need it should take it from Scopus itself or from the publisher's journal pages at the time of use. That caution is general good practice for this journal: its metrics are strong in every database checked, but the exact decimal depends on the source and the release, and the society's homepage figure and the SCImago record are the two most direct references.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, verified directly in the DOAJ search API for this profile using both the print and online ISSNs; both ISSN searches returned the same single record. Aggregator records for the title additionally report indexing in Scopus, the Science Citation Index Expanded within Web of Science, PubMed and Embase. The Scopus coverage is independently consistent with the SCImago record carried on this JournalsWorld page, and Web of Science coverage is a precondition for the Journal Impact Factor the publisher displays. Indexing claims for any journal should be re-verified in the databases themselves before being relied on for a formal evaluation, but for this title the DOAJ listing and the SCImago presence are directly confirmed, and the remaining services are consistently reported across independent aggregators.

For readers, the practical consequence is that ERR content is discoverable wherever respiratory literature is normally searched: PubMed for clinical questions, Scopus and Web of Science for citation tracking, and Google Scholar for general discovery. Because articles are open access, a search result leads to the full text rather than a paywall, which is part of why the journal's reviews are so widely used in teaching and guideline background work.

Who Should Read It, and Who Should Submit

The natural readership is respiratory physicians, respiratory researchers, and the wider team around them — specialist nurses, physiologists, thoracic surgeons and intensive care clinicians whose work touches lung disease. Trainees benefit particularly: a well-built ERR review is often the fastest reliable route from a guideline headline to the evidence and controversies underneath it. Researchers entering a new subfield use the journal the same way, to map a literature before designing a study.

For authors, the fit test is different from a research journal. A submission should offer synthesis, judgement and structure — a clear question, comprehensive coverage of the important literature, and an account of disagreements and gaps, not merely a summary of abstracts. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses should follow recognised reporting standards for evidence synthesis. Because commissioned content is central to the journal, an unsolicited proposal should normally begin with contact with the editorial office and the current author instructions, and the charges table above should be read before submission so that licence choice (CC BY versus CC BY-NC) and any applicable discount or waiver route are settled early. Authors whose funders require a CC BY licence should note that this is the most expensive route in the table unless a read-and-publish agreement covers their institution.

Relationship to the European Respiratory Journal

Confusion between this title and the European Respiratory Journal is common, and the two are distinct journals with distinct ISSNs and roles. The European Respiratory Journal (print ISSN 0903-1936, online ISSN 1399-3003) is the society's flagship for original research. The European Respiratory Review (print ISSN 0905-9180, online ISSN 1600-0617) is the review companion covered here. Citations, DOIs and journal abbreviations differ accordingly (Eur. Respir. J. versus Eur. Respir. Rev.), and authors should check which title a reference actually belongs to before citing it. A third sibling, ERJ Open Research, publishes original research open access. Keeping the family straight matters for accurate referencing and for choosing the right submission destination within the society's portfolio.

Verification Notes and Frequently Asked Questions

Is the European Respiratory Review open access? Yes. Articles are free to read, the title is listed in DOAJ (verified directly for this profile), and articles carry CC BY or CC BY-NC licences according to the DOAJ record and the publisher's charges structure.

What does it cost to publish? It depends on article type, licence, membership and country. The publisher's table from 1 April 2026 charges EUR 1,465 for a review under CC BY-NC at the standard rate (EUR 1,245 for ERS members; reduced or free rates for Research4Life countries) and EUR 3,640 for the CC BY licence; specially commissioned editorials and reviews, and correspondence responding to a published article, are excluded from the charge. Institutional read-and-publish agreements may cover eligible authors in full.

What is the journal's impact factor? The publisher's journal homepage displays 10.8. SCImago 2025, as carried in the JournalsWorld record, gives SJR 3.57 and h-index 115 (Q1). OpenAlex counts differ by design, as explained in the metrics section.

Does the journal publish original research? Its stated content is review articles, editorials, correspondence and summaries of important recent research. Original datasets normally belong in a primary-research journal; check the current ERS author instructions for the definitive list of article types.

How often does it appear? Articles are published continuously online and collected into quarterly issues, one volume per year.

Where is the publisher based? The European Respiratory Society publishes the journal; the JournalsWorld record lists Switzerland and the DOAJ record lists the publisher country as GB. The ERS journal pages are the authoritative source for publisher details, and this profile reports both attributions rather than choosing between them.

Acceptance rate and median peer-review duration for this journal are not published in the sources checked for this profile, and are therefore stated here as not publicly disclosed rather than estimated. Readers who need those operational details should ask the editorial office directly.