Preparing an article for resubmission — Addressing reviewers’ comments — Yay or Nay!
Did your latest scientific expedition fall flat on the reviewer’s face? Did your journal paper fail to make the cut among the niche areas of a highly reputed journal? Or did your findings not strike a chord in the Editor’s heart?
IF your answer is ‘YES’ to either of the above, continue reading this post — else, I congratulate you on a successful publication of your journal paper! Way to go!
Now, say the reviewers and the editor provide you with constructive criticism and agree that your work has merit. However, you feel that the queries from the editorial office do not justify and acknowledge the hard work you have put in in the last 2 years (a long term monitoring of a bridge, human behavior in confined spaces amidst lockdown, or robust research instruments for ecosystem productivity and sustainability).
For the Editors and Reviewers to understand YOU, you must understand THEM!
Consider the three groups involved in a potential journal publication: The Editor, the Reviewer/s, and the Author/s. The Editor is the supreme authority on a journal paper with responsibilities ranging from providing preliminary review reports to authors (before peer review), assigning reviewers — who as experts - can turn the tide of your paper, and you — the group or the individual who toiled all through the night, amidst hardships and fallacies, to finally overcome the writer’s block hurdle to get the paper DONE.
While the Editor knows that good reviewers will provide criticisms to quickly get the paper over the line, the reviewers will primarily want to acknowledge their areas of expertise through your work. You’d essentially want to acknowledge the reviewers for seeing what you didn’t, for thinking what you didn’t, and for articulating what you didn’t. As long as your revised comments address the reviewers’ concerns, you should be fine. This may be in the form of point-wise answers to their queries or carrying out additional work that might be required to appease them.
YOU should bear in mind that this blog aims to ease your apprehensions about the review process, viz., GET the work done in a relatively less amount of time, with the least of efforts.
1. Start by drafting a review response — ONLY TEXT first!
The most efficient way (I found it so) to react when you get a review is to chalk down a defense plan. Now, this would include curating a preliminary response to reviewers in the most informal sense possible and preparing a sketch of how you intend to address the queries. Running off to a lab to get more experiments done, setting up a numerical simulation, and asking your supervisor facilities for a field study will send you down a rabbit hole that will most certainly delay your structured response to the review comments. Remember — the REVIEWER is the be-all and end-all of the paper. If you can appease the reviewer and satisfactorily answer the queries, your paper will be accepted in no time.
A successful strategy employed by experienced scientists and researchers includes getting a clear solid defense plan right from the start. This includes drafting a file with enumerated comments of the reviewers (marked in red) and answering them (in black). TEXT FIRST! Take a stab at the comments and see how many you can answer on the first go. Highlight the portions — and remove the highlights as you complete — for the extended work which needs an additional measure to get it over the line. Keep your spirits high, you’re nearly there.
Here’s a PRO-TIP!
Provide a detailed response sheet to the reviewers (say 7–10 pages long) so that you DO NOT have to carry out major changes to your actual manuscript. Based on my reviewing experience, it is not unusual to see clever authors providing a 10-page response accompanying minor edits to their manuscripts. Adding a few sentences in the grand scheme of things, throwing in references the reviewers explicitly asked for, and going out of the way to cite a few more does not do any harm!
2. Admit your work’s shortcomings
Basically, the two schools of thought in this context are:
(a) The reviewer says — You need to address your limitation for the paper to go through, OR
(b) The reviewer says — ADMIT, your work does not provide the outcomes of so and so investigation and will not hold its ground under severe scrutiny.
(a) IF, and I repeat, ONLY IF the additional experiment or simulation you are planning to address a specific reviewer query does not consume much of your time, I suggest you go for it. But, make sure you come out on top with this. Additionally, make a way in the reviewer’s mind that the extra work addresses a specific query and the additional ones mentioned in the query sheet.
(b) — You’d be surprised to know that more often than not, a clear statement- agreeing with the limitations stated by the reviewer — does the trick. The reviewer is more than happy to see your paper go through to the next stage with only 1 line of comment from you. It makes both you and the reviewer happy!
3. Cite every reference the reviewer is asking for!
At times, it becomes clear that the reviewer wants you to cite one or more papers. While some reviewers provide this as an option, a personal preference for experienced researchers is always to go with the reviewer’s flow. Example — “The authors should know that Kalman filter techniques are real-time methods as well. Smith et al. 2000 have mentioned their advantages and the authors should provide a narrative here”. This means — CITE the damn paper! The reviewer might be Smith, or a close friend of Smith, or has an inclination towards Smith being a forerunner in this topic. If you cite Smith et al. 2000, the reviewer will be pleased and provide more respect to you and your research.
4. Be courageous — yet humble — in saying ‘NO’ to exorbitant requests.
Unless the validity of your work is in doubt, you should have the courage to humbly decline the reviewers’ wishes mentioning that the “Additional investigations asked by the reviewer here fall beyond the purview of our work. We certainly hope to include such studies in our future explorations”.
5. Provide a lay summary!
While the reviewers took their time out to go through your paper and provide a basic overview of the draft, it is academically sound to show respect to their time and effort by providing a lay summary of whatever they have done. It is often a good practice to start your response sheet with a bird’s eye view of what the reviewers commented on your manuscript. This lets the Editor know not only about your efforts in revising the manuscript but also reminds the Editor about the Reviewers comments from the previous round of inquisition. For example, I have seen responses to reviewers' comments start with: “Reviewer #1 and #2 were keen to understand the scope of the work in the purview of online detection capabilities which were not carried out in the previous version. Reviewer #3 was more critical about the work but acknowledged our presentation capabilities and the strong suite of algorithms that we have developed.”
