Top Pulmonology journals
The leading journals in pulmonology, ranked within their own field — not across all of science. The measure is computed from open data; how it works, and its limits, are set out in our method.
Scope: Pulmonary Medicine (NLM Broad Subject Terms).
Grouped by quality band, best first, and listed alphabetically within each band — the bands are the ranking; we do not order named journals against one another.
Top 5%
11
- Annals of the American Thoracic Society
- Chest
- Clinics in chest medicine
- Current allergy and asthma reports
- European respiratory review : an official journal of the European Respiratory Society
- Journal of thoracic oncology : official publication of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer
- Respiratory research
- The European respiratory journal
- The Journal of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery
- The Lancet. Respiratory medicine
- Thorax
Top 10%
6
- American journal of physiology. Lung cellular and molecular physiology
- Lung
- Paediatric respiratory reviews
- Pulmonary pharmacology & therapeutics
- Respiratory medicine
- Respirology : official journal of the Asian Pacific Society of Respirology
Top 25%
17
- Annals of allergy, asthma & immunology : official publication of the American College of Allergy, Asthma, & Immunology
- ATS scholar
- BMC pulmonary medicine
- Chronic respiratory disease
- Clinical lung cancer
- Current opinion in pulmonary medicine
- European journal of cardio-thoracic surgery : official journal of the European Association for Cardio-thoracic Surgery
- Expert review of respiratory medicine
- International journal of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
- Journal of cystic fibrosis : official journal of the European Cystic Fibrosis Society
- Pediatric pulmonology
- Pulmonary medicine
- Pulmonology
- Respiration; international review of thoracic diseases
- Respiratory care
- The international journal of tuberculosis and lung disease : the official journal of the International Union against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease
- Thoracic surgery clinics
Top 50%
17
- Allergy and asthma proceedings :
- Canadian respiratory journal
- COPD
- Experimental lung research
- Jornal brasileiro de pneumologia : publicaça̋o oficial da Sociedade Brasileira de Pneumologia e Tisilogia
- Journal of breath research
- Journal of bronchology & interventional pulmonology
- Journal of cardiothoracic surgery
- Pediatric allergy, immunology, and pulmonology
- Respiratory investigation
- Respiratory physiology & neurobiology
- Seminars in thoracic and cardiovascular surgery
- Seminars in thoracic and cardiovascular surgery. Pediatric cardiac surgery annual
- The Annals of thoracic surgery
- The clinical respiratory journal
- Thoracic cancer
- Tuberculosis
Unranked
17
- Advances in respiratory medicine
- Annals of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery : official journal of the Association of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeons of Asia
- Archivos de bronconeumología
- Asian cardiovascular & thoracic annals
- General thoracic and cardiovascular surgery
- Heart, lung & circulation
- Interactive cardiovascular and thoracic surgery
- Monaldi archives for chest disease = Archivio Monaldi per le malattie del torace
- Pneumologia : revista Societății Române de Pneumologie
- Pneumologie
- Respiratory medicine and research
- Revue des maladies respiratoires
- The Indian journal of chest diseases & allied sciences
- The Journal of asthma : official journal of the Association for the Care of Asthma
- The Thoracic and cardiovascular surgeon
- Tuberkulëz i bolezni lëgkikh
- Tüberküloz ve toraks
68 ranked journals. Computed 2026-09-04, citation window 2019–2022. Journals too new or too small to rank fairly are not listed — “unranked” is not a zero.
Questions
- Why do thoracic-oncology and allergy/asthma journals appear here?
- The NLM files several of them under Pulmonary Medicine, so they are ranked here on the same basis as every other title. Where a journal's primary discipline is Neoplasms or Allergy and Immunology, it appears on that list instead.
- Where are the critical-care journals?
- Critical care is a neighbouring NLM discipline with its own list. A journal such as an intensive-care title is ranked there, even though respiratory and critical-care practice overlap heavily.
- How current is this ranking?
- It is recomputed about once a year over a multi-year citation window, and the calculation date is shown beneath the list. Recent, fast-moving work may not yet be reflected in citation counts.
Spotted an error?
If a journal looks misclassified — the wrong discipline, a missing title, a band that seems off — please tell us at [email protected]. Every report gets an answer, and a confirmed error is corrected at the latest when the ranking is next recomputed.
What this is not
- This ranks journals, not individual articles: it says nothing about the validity of any single paper.
- It is not medical advice and no substitute for clinical judgement or reading the work itself.
- The ranking is factual and method-based, computed the same way for every title. Like any method that ranks journals, though, it carries bias and is not a definitive judgement on a journal's quality or relevance — neither an endorsement nor a criticism of any journal or publisher.
See also the Pulmonology literature digest — a daily email of new pulmonology articles, filtered by these same quality bands.