This is a blog piece is written with Sue Fletcher-Watson, a colleague of supreme wisdom and tact, ideally qualified for this particular post. It is a follow-up to our previous joint post about peer-review. We now turn our attention to the response to reviewers.
As with the role of reviewer, junior scientists submitting their work as authors are given little (if any) guidance on how to interact with their reviewers. Interactions with reviewers are an incredibly valuable opportunity to improve your manuscript and find the best way of presenting your science. However, all too often responding to reviewers is seen as an onerous chore, which partly reflects the attitude we take into the process. These exchanges largely happen in private and even though they play a critical role in academia, we rarely talk about them in public. We think this needs to change – here are some pointers for how to interact with your reviewers.
Engage with the spirit of the review
Your reviewers will be representative of a portion of your intended readership. Sometimes when reading reviewers’ comments we can find ourselves asking “have they even read the paper?!”. But if the reviewer has misunderstood some critical aspect of the paper then it is entirely possible that a proportion of the broader readership will also. An apparently misguided review, whilst admittedly frustrating, should be taken as a warning sign. Give yourself a day or two to settle your temper, and then recognise that this is your opportunity to make your argument clearer and more convincing.
Similarly, resist the temptation to undertake the minimal possible revisions in order to get your paper past the reviewers. If a reviewer makes a good point and you can think of ways of using your data to address it, then go for it, even if this goes beyond what they specified. Remember – this is your last chance to make this manuscript as good as it can be.
Be grateful and respectful. But don’t be afraid to disagree with your reviewers.
Writing a good review takes time. Thank the reviewers for their efforts. Be polite and respectful, even if you think a review is not particularly constructive. But don’t be afraid to disagree with reviewers. Sometimes reviewers ask you to do things that you don’t think are valid or wise, and it’s important to defend your work. No one wants a dog’s dinner of a paper… a sort of patchwork of awkwardly combined paragraphs designed to appease various reviewer comments. As the author you need to retain ownership of the work. This will mean that sometimes you need to explain why a recommendation has not been actioned. You can acknowledge the importance of a reviewer’s point, without including it in your manuscript.
We have both experienced reviewers who have requested changes we don’t feel are legitimate. Examples include the reviewer who requested a correlational analysis on a sub-group with a sample size of n=17. Or the reviewer who asked Sue to describe how her results, from a study with participants aged 18 and over, might relate to early signs of autism in infancy (answer: they have no bearing whatsoever and I’m not prepared to speculate in print). Or the reviewer who asked for inclusion of variables in a regression analysis which did not correlate with the outcome, (despite that being a clearly-stated criterion for inclusion in the analysis), on the basis of their personal hunch. In these cases, politely but firmly refusing to make a change may be the right thing to do, though you can nearly always provide some form of concession. For example, in the last case, you might include an extra justification, with a supporting citation, for your chosen regression method.
Give your response a clear and transparent structure
With any luck, your revised manuscript will go out to the same people who reviewed it the first time. If you do a particularly good job of addressing their comments – and if the original comments themselves were largely minor – your editor may even decide your manuscript doesn’t need peer review a second time. In any case, to maximise the chances of a good result it is essential that you present your response clearly, concisely and fluently.
Start by copying and pasting the reviewer comments into a document. Organise them into numbered lists, one for each reviewer. This might mean breaking down multi-part comments into separate items, and you may also wish to paraphrase to make your response a bit more succinct. However, beware of changing the reviewer’s intended meaning!
Then provide your responses under each numbered point, addressed to the editor (“The reviewer makes an excellent point and…”). In each case, try to: acknowledge the validity of what the reviewer is saying; briefly mention how you have addressed the point; give a page reference. This ‘response to reviewers’ document should be accompanied by an updated manuscript in which any significant areas of new text , or heavily edited text, are highlighted something like this. Don’t submit a revised manuscript with tracked changes – these are too detailed and messy for a reviewer to have to navigate – and don’t feel the need to highlight every changed word.
If it’s an especially complicated or lengthy response, then it is sometimes a good idea to include a (very) pithy summary up top for the Editor, before you get to the reviewer-specific response. A handful of bullet points can help orient the Editor to the major changes that they can expect to find in the new version of your manuscript.
The response letter can be a great place to include additional analyses that didn’t make it into the paper
Often when exploring the impact of various design choices or testing the impact of assumptions on your analysis, additional comparisons can be very useful. We both often include additional analyses in our ‘response to reviewer’ letters. This aids transparency and can also be a useful way of showing reviewers that your findings are solid. Sometimes these will be analyses that have been explicitly asked for, but on other occasions you may well want to do this from your initiative. As reviewers we are both greatly impressed when authors use their own data to address a point, even if we didn’t explicitly ask them to do this.
One word of warning here, however. Remember that you don’t want to put an important piece of information or line of reasoning only in your response letter, if it ought also to be in the final manuscript. If you’ve completed an extra analysis as part of your consideration of a reviewer point, consider whether this might also have relevance to your readership when the paper is published. It might be important to leave it out – you don’t want to include ‘red herring’ analyses or look like you are scraping the statistical barrel by testing ‘til the cows come home. But on the other hand, if the analysis directly answers a question which is likely to be in your reader’s mind, consider including it. This could be as a supplement, linked online data set, or a simple statement: e.g. “we repeated all analyses excluding n=2 participants with epilepsy and results were the same”.
Sometimes you may need the nuclear option
We have both had experiences where we have been forced to make direct contact with the Action Editor. A caveat to all the points above is that there are occasions where reviewers attempt to block the publication of a manuscript unreasonably. Duncan had an experience of a reviewer who simply cut and paste their original review, and reused it across multiple subsequent rounds of revision. Duncan thought that his team had done a good job of addressing the reviewer’s concerns, where possible, but without any specific guidance from the reviewer they were at a loss to identify what they should do next. Having already satisfied two other reviewers, he decided to contact the Action Editor and explain the situation. They accepted the paper. Sue has blogged before about a paper reporting on a small RCT which was rejected for the simple reason that it reported a null result. She approached the Editor with her concern and it was agreed that the paper should be re-submitted as a new manuscript and sent out again for a fresh set of reviews. This shouldn’t be necessary, but sadly sometimes it is.
Editors will not be happy with authors trying to circumvent the proper review process, but in our experience they are sympathetic to authors when papers are blocked by unreasonable reviewers. After all, we have all been there. If this is the situation you find yourself in, be as diplomatic as possible and outline your concerns to the Editor.
In conclusion, much of what we want to say can probably be summed up with the following: This is not a tick-box exercise, but the last opportunity to improve your paper before it reaches your audience. Engage with your reviewers, be open-minded, and don’t be afraid to rethink.
Really, when it comes to responding to reviewers, the clue is in the name. It’s a response, not a reaction – so be thoughtful, be engaged and be a good scientist.