About Environmental Research Letters

Environmental Research Letters™ (ERL) is an open-access journal serving as the meeting place of research and policy communities concerned with the impact and outcomes of environmental change, and the critical need for management, adaptation, and solutions. ERL advocates for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations, encouraging researchers to engage with policymakers and industry, to address the most pressing, urgent, and critical challenges spanning natural and built environments.

Topically, the journal’s scope covers all environmental research. What defines the journal is its focus on publishing high-impact research Letters. Research Letters should be concise and accessible, considering the broad and multidisciplinary readership of ERL. We expect the significance and impact of findings to be clearly communicated, demonstrating why the work is timely, requires urgent attention by a global audience, and demands rapid publication.

Our social media accounts on LinkedIn and Bluesky promote ERL published content, new focus collections, journal development and Board Member activities.

• High standards: our professional in-house editors manage the peer review process, and alongside our Editorial Board ensure standards are maintained at a high level and customer service is prioritized.
• Fast publication: we are committed to providing you with a quick, professional service to ensure rapid first decision, acceptance and publication. Once accepted, your article will be accessible to readers within 24 hours and will include a citable DOI.
• Open access: our open access model removes any barriers for our readers resulting in articles receiving over 1600 downloads on average within the first six months of publication.
• Transfer opportunities: as well as accepting direct submissions, the journal also offers you a quick and easy solution to transfer your manuscript from another IOP Publishing journal if it does not fit that journal’s scope or significance criteria. Articles are transferred along with peer review reports to save time and avoid duplication of work for reviewers.
• International Editorial Board: as a diverse and inclusive group of leading scholars, our Editors embody the core mission of ERL to champion increasingly interdisciplinary approaches to environmental research.
• Society owned: IOP Publishing is a leading society publisher of advanced physics research. Any profits generated by IOP Publishing are invested in the Institute of Physics, helping to support research, education and outreach around the world.
• Making an impact: with an Impact Factor placing ERL amongst the highest journals in its field, a broad readership, and published articles frequently covered in the media, a wide reach for your work is ensured.

Authors can publish supplementary material alongside their article. Supplementary material includes additional tables, figures, methodological descriptions, and data files that provide details on assumptions or results. Please also refer to the data policy for further information about research data, data repositories and data citation.

The word limits of all article types exclude titles, abstract, figures, tables, captions, and references. ERL welcomes submissions of the following article types:

• Letters: concise high impact original research, maximum 4000 words, making a timely, novel, and significant contribution to environmental science and research. Authors must ensure their articles are written as concisely as possible with the journal’s broad readership in mind. Letters which exceed 4000 words, without a thorough justification in a cover letter (i.e. why shortening the article would adversely affect rigor or clarity) may not be considered. Articles involving qualitative research can utilize supplementary information to meet the requirements for length. In such instances, the supplementary information must be presented concisely and clearly in a way that transparently demonstrates the evidence for the claims made in the main text.
• Topical Reviews: ERL’s preference is to lead the way in publishing quantitative, evidence-based review articles of important environmental questions. Please see the Environmental Research Reviews page for full details on article requirements, and how to submit your proposal or article to the journal.
• Perspectives: evidence-based, maximum 2000 words, exploring a contemporary topic, or scientific/policy problem. These articles should present limited published data or case study example(s) to support insights offered. Discussion on the future direction of research should be included, alongside any policy implications or recommendations. These articles must exclude an abstract, have no more than two figures and tables, and fewer than 20 references.
• Viewpoints: invited commentary articles, typically 1000 words, serving to either highlight the significance, impact and wider implications of recent research appearing in ERL, or to comment on significant research developments.

ERL considers Comments and Replies: critically constructive commentaries on original research Letters published in ERL within the past six months. Comments submitted after this date will not be considered. A comment article must pertain to the original ERL article, be timely, focussed, factually based, of clear value to readers, be measured and professional in tone, and provide a significant and useful addition to the scientific literature and on-going scholarly discussion (i.e. not simply identifying error(s) in the original published article—these are addressed via a correction). A maximum length of three journal pages is suggested.

Justification statement

Research Letters are concise, timely, and impactful research communications. They are distinct from short research Papers. In a justification statement, authors should be able to communicate why their research demands urgent publication and attention by a global audience and is therefore suitable for ERL.

Authors are asked to download and complete this justification statement template. During ‘Step 2: File Upload’ of the formal submission process, authors should upload this file, selecting ‘Justification Statement’ as the file designation from the drop-down list.

Reviewers and Editorial Board Members approached during the peer review process will have access to author justification statements and may consider them an important factor when recommending publication.

Cover letters are encouraged but are only accessible to the in-house ERL editorial team. In a cover letter, authors can mention whether their manuscript was invited for submission, refer to relevant conference participation, or any Editorial Board Member interaction they may have had which led to submission.

We work with our authors to help make their work as easy to discover as possible. ERL is currently included in the following abstracting and discovery services:

• Baidu Scholar
• CAB Abstracts
• Chemical Abstracts Service
• CNKI
• DOAJ
• Ei Compendex
• GEOBASE
• GeoRef
• INIS (International Nuclear Information System)
• Inspec
• J-Gate
• JST
• MyScienceWork
• NASA Astrophysics Data System
• Naver Academic
• ProQuest; Central, Engineering Collection, Engineering Database, Environmental Science Collection, Environmental Science Database, Natural Science Collection, SciTech Premium Collection, Technology Collection
• R Discovery
• Scilit
• Scite
• Scopus
• Semantic Scholar
• Wanfang Data
• Web of Science (Science Citation Index Expanded, Current Contents Agriculture, Biology & Environmental Sciences, Current Contents Physical, Chemical & Earth Sciences, Essential Science Indicators)
• WTI AG
• x-mol