How to respond to ‘Revise and Resubmit’ from a journal: 5 sure steps
‘Major Revisions’ — how do I deal with it?
Publish or Perish — the old adage still prevalent in academia — is one of the first advice a supervisor provides a student. To gain visibility of your work, sharing the work with others in an established platform is important. Newly minted academicians, early-career enthusiasts, and academic veterans unanimously face issues with peer review.
Getting your work published comes with good quality of work, accurate presentation, a sheer amount of luck, and most importantly — solving a problem that was either not previously thought of or improving existing practice that gets the job done. Multiple rounds of reviews — both favorable and discouraging — get a manuscript polished to the extent that it satisfies the Editor and the reviewers who have kindly taken the time out to provide insights into improving the draft. After submitting a manuscript, the best possible outcome is the Editor providing an opportunity to address the reviewers’ comments and resubmit the paper. Over time, I have developed a straightforward approach to these requests.
In this blog, I will mention my 5 top approaches for addressing the caveat ‘Revise and Resubmit’.
Disclaimer: The thoughts shared in this article are based on my experience gained through my research years. This article is by no means, an exhaustive read for addressing review responses. The following methods are structured as generic responses and are not case-specific. Feel free to reach out to me in case you need help curating review responses for your manuscript!
1. What is the Editor asking — Read the email minutely!
The Editor is responsible for accepting the reviewers’ comments. Make sure you get the ‘Revise and Resubmit’ comment. This action is asked based on reviewers’ suggestions that are usually accompanied by Editor’s comments. Make sure you prepare revisions for both the Editor and the reviewers. Other possible responses from the Editor include: (a) Reject (without encouragement to re-submit), (b) Minor revisions, (c) Acceptance — no need to provide detailed responses to the reviewers. If you are unsure about the action you are asked to perform, or the email is riddled with ambiguities, feel free to email the Editor to remove the confusion before proceeding.
2. Create a preliminary document
This should be primarily an informal document chalking down a list of possible ways you can address the review comments. The most common behavior usually observed in new and early-career academicians is to first have a bird’s eye view of the comments and running off to a rabbit hole — called the ‘laboratory’ — to address the queries, from which you never recover now, do you? You then go to your supervisor to ask for an extension in the deadline and somewhere deep down the line you feel that you need to see it through the proper way and appease the reviewer.
Here’s a PRO-TIP!
List down the queries asked of you and provide itemized ‘text-only’ response at the first go. This includes drafting a file with enumerated comments of the reviewers (marked in red) and answering them (in black). Highlight the portions that are on your to-do list but make sure to remove them as you go forward.
3. Avoid conflict — Organize the response to reviewers’ comments!
One of the persistent issues I have heard academicians complain about is the approach reviewers adopt while providing their comments. On some occasions, the reviews can contain useful information, but not relay the information in a congenial fashion. Often, multiple reviewers will suggest you change a conceptual framework that might require re-structuring of the literature that leads to a conflict. What I have found useful is to group the literature review together — to include the suggestions from all reviewers — and label them. For example, two conflicting reviewers might comment: ‘The research methods described are inadequate and do not provide enough background’ AND ‘The literature review is excessive — Please shorten it.’ Situations such as this require an adequate response to the reviewers as: ‘We have now provided instances of how these methods have evolved since the last three decades. Please refer to the table below for more details’ AND ‘As reviewer #1 has suggested an extensive overview of the literature survey, we have now deleted certain portions pertaining to the method (so and so) in order to shorten the content. Please note that after addressing the queries from both the reviewers, the content of the review has not changed significantly.’ ALWAYS be humble! Goes a long way.
4. Plan a line of defense — step by step, itemized review responses.
While it’s absolutely necessary to answer all the review queries, you can appreciate the additional feedback and the general comments the reviewers have to offer. An incentivized and itemized review response generally consists of jotting down all the queries of the reviewers and sequentially addressing them on the fly. An approach that I have found effective is through answering the easiest queries and then supplementing these with figures or plots, if applicable.
Experienced researchers have always found that providing detailed review responses requires the least amount of editing in the actual manuscript. This is one of the clever tricks that can be easily adopted. The preliminary document created in Step #2 is now crucial to identify any ideas that you had in the beginning; it now provides a platform to build upon and capitalize.
5. Check — double-check — and check again!
In the process of addressing the review comments and removing the highlights corresponding to each ‘DONE’ item on your to-do list, you should first check if all the review queries were actually present on the list. This is the stage where you should go back to the original set of questions (and comments, of course) and see if you have not missed anything. Check the preliminary response sheet, and identify if you have not only addressed all of the reviewers’ queries but also incorporated the suggestions provided by the Editor.
Before submitting, read the revised manuscript to ensure the flow of thoughts and the connectivity between each concept. It is important to now read it with a fresh mind — perhaps with a cup of coffee — and treat it as if unaware of the reviews, just like your intended audience (reader) would do.
What should I include in a Revised Submission?
A ‘Revise and Resubmit’ usually requires all of the 4 documents in the following order:
- A Cover letter — highlighting the revisions you have considered.
- The revised manuscript — including the revisions to the reviewers. This comes with highlights to indicate the review responses.
- The clean manuscript — free from any highlights, but incorporated with the review responses.
- The response sheet — a document with itemized responses to the reviewers’ comments and queries.
1. Cover Letter
This is the first document that the Editor will view from the re-submission portal. The cover letter should include the revised work carried out at this stage of the revision. Usually written by the corresponding author, the cover letter provides a brief overview of the highlights carried out in the revision stage and their implications in the actual manuscript (say the paper length decreased from 20 to 15 pages). This is your opportunity to showcase the improvements in your paper, thank the Editor, and appreciate the Reviewers for their comments.
Here is a sample cover letter addressing the Editor of a journal:
To
The Editor (in case you know who the handling Editor is, write <Prof. Editor name>)
Journal of <Journal Name>
<Name of the Publisher>
Thank you for providing us with the opportunity to revise the manuscript <paper title>. We also take this opportunity to thank the reviewers for providing their insights and valuable comments which have significantly enhanced the quality of the paper. We have addressed the queries posted by the reviewers, highlighted the locations of the review responses in the draft, provided and itemized responses to the review questions.
Please find the review response sheet titled as <’response to reviewers.pdf>. This document contains the itemized responses to the reviewers’ questions and is consistent with the content presented in the revised manuscript. For the convenience of the reviewers, we have highlighted the review responses for Reviewer#1 in yellow and green for Reviewer#2 <update as applicable>.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely yours,
<Corresponding author’s name>
You can also find a detailed example of what goes into a technical cover letter from Ref. [1] and [2].
2. Revised Manuscript
While revising your manuscript, you need to keep a track of the changes you have carried out — either in the form of track changes in Word, highlighting the portions added or changing the font color (to red, preferably) — indicating the locations of the possible additions (or deletions) from the old version of the article. This makes it easier for the reviewer to follow the location of the response and enables a steady comparison with the original version of the paper. An example of track change is provided here:
Query#5: Page 3, line 42, second column: The reviewer finds the description of the method inadequate. The authors are requested to provide a detailed description of the proposed methodology.
Response: We appreciate the reviewer for this comment and apologize for the oversight in not elucidating the methodology. We have now added substantial content for explaining the proposed approach — starting from a brief introduction, to its application, and the novelty of the work. This revision can be found on Page <#> of the revised manuscript, from lines <# to #>, highlighted in yellow.
3. A clean version of the manuscript
This version — as the name suggests — includes only the content of the article and does not include any track changes, highlights, or contradictory font colors. This version indicates the final structure of the article from your side and allows a seamless review of the content by the Editor and the Reviewers without any distraction.
4. The response sheet
This is one of the key documents that need to be provided alongside ‘Revise and Resubmit’ advice. Start the document with a suitable heading (Response to Reviewers’ Comments), the manuscript title, the manuscript ID, and the names of the authors.
This document includes an itemized list of the response to all the review queries, reviewers' comments, and sidenotes (if available). Experienced researchers create an extensive response sheet to allow minor edits to the actual article. Make sure you do it too! Remember, always be polite and respectful of the reviewers.
My thoughts in a nutshell
Responding to reviewers’ queries is something that can be gained from experience and good exposure — you need the practice to be perfect! I hope you found this an engaging read and the samples, effective.
Thank you for reading!
References
- Response to Reviewers (https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/research-publication/response-reviewers).
- What should be included in a cover letter? (https://service.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/155/supporthub/publishing/~/what-should-be-included-in-a-cover-letter%3F/)
