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Adding (side) material to satisfy referees?

In our February "how can we help you?" thread, a reader inquires:

I'm looking for input & shared experiences on the following R&R situation.

Got an R&R a couple months back which I've revised and am ready to resubmit. It's for a journal with no word limit. Still, the revised version is now 3,000 words longer than the original. But, 2,000 of those words belong to a section developed exclusively to address the complaint of the more negative review which was a BIG complaint. Here's an analogy that explains what I mean by BIG.

Imagine you write a paper on a topic in moral psychology, say blame. Then the negative reviewer says, "You can't talk about blame without talking about how it relates to X issue in moral metaphysics (e.g. realism about moral properties)." That's what I am dealing with here.

As the writer, a natural thought is: "This isn't a paper about moral metaphysics; it's a paper about moral psychology. Would that I could just do the response work in a footnote that notes connections but is direct about this paper's frame. But obviously this person thinks you can't do one without the other, so I better please them, and not by just writing a footnote."

I suppose one response to my situation is that my response doesn't have to be 2,000 words. Sure. And I'm trying to cut it. But given the nature of their issue, it seems they were asking that quite a lot get done. So yeah, looking for advice.

I'm curious what readers think about this. I've heard that some people may try to push back against referees on stuff like this, writing in their response to referees why they think the requested revisions aren't warranted, or at least, why they think they can just address the issue quickly in a footnote. This isn't my approach, however. My experience as an author has been that if one referee cares about X, chances are pretty high that other referees will care about X too–and in turn, readers of the article when it comes out in the journal probably will too. So, for better or worse, my general policy is to do what referees ask, and then engage in clever editing so that I can keep the paper under the journal's word limit. The only downside, I think, is that this can result in bloated 'Frankenstein'-like papers (see picture below). But whatever: such is life in academic publishing. Or so say I. What do you all think? What would you advise the OP?

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6 responses to “Adding (side) material to satisfy referees?”

  1. Take no sh*t

    If I were the OP, I would put the extra section in the letter, fully addressing the reviewer’s comments, and then add a more brief, footnote-length discussion in the manuscript. Then in the letter I would explain why I think the more brief treatment is sufficient. So, show that you can do the work, but make the case for why it wouldn’t improve the paper.
    Anecdotally, I was once in the opposite sort of situation, where a reviewer’s comments led me to cut something that I would have preferred to keep. In later discussions of the paper, I kept finding myself coming back to the section I’d removed, and explaining how I would have developed my view, but for a reviewer. So I now see the paper as much worse than it could have been because I too quickly acceded to a reviewer’s demands, and I really regret it. I know we’re all in publish or perish mode, and that satisfying reviewers is often what it takes to avoid the “perish” bit. But this is also your work we’re talking about here, and you’ve got to be able to look at it and be happy with the final product when everything is said and done.

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  2. Assistant Professor

    I appreciate Marcus’s reply that if something is an issue for one reviewer it might also be an issue for another – and for that reason the author should take it seriously – but I don’t think it is fair to assume that because something is an issue for one reviewer that reviewer is correct.
    I would encourage the OP to take the reviewer’s remarks seriously, but that doesn’t require doing exactly what the reviewer says. It is important to have good reasons, though, for not following a suggestion and I think it is 100% appropriate to include those reasons (politely and succinctly) in a response to the reviewers when submitting the revision. It might be worth saying something like “the reviewer makes a good point that some readers may not think you can do X without first addressing Y and I have included a footnote to flag readers of this potential concern and why I am bracketing it out in this paper.”

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  3. Michel

    Like the others, I’d opt for a shorter version in the text itself. A footnote is great, but if it seemed like a real sticking point, I’d extend to 200-500 words. But 2000 seems like real overkill, even for the sort of case described.
    More generally, I’d say that 2000 words is usually a lot of words for a section.

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  4. op

    Thanks for the feedback, folks.
    Michel, I’d just add that I work in the history of philosophy, where for certain papers, and counting quotations, 2,000 word sections are not uncommon.

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  5. another historian

    Just for another data point (also a historian of philosophy):
    I recently got an R&R for a paper on a topic in period X, where one of the referees wanted me to write a whole new section on the same topic in period Y. (The paper’s argument did have implications for period Y, but I’m not an expert on that period, nor did I claim to be, so these implications were just signaled at.)
    I explained in the response letter why I’m not going to write that new section — it would have turned the paper into something quite different, and it was already on the long side with 12k words. The paper got accepted after resubmission.

    Reply
  6. Hungry Dog

    I recently refereed a paper (maybe the OP’s!) in which nearly all of my R&R suggestions were handled by the author in newly bloated footnotes, leaving the main text pretty much unchanged.
    As I basically liked the paper, I wasn’t terribly ticked off. But this way of handling my suggestions — which I’d spent a LOT of time on — left the distinct impression the author didn’t think much of them, or didn’t get the thrust, but felt I had to be pleased in some way. Like I was thrown a bone while the meat of it stayed as it was.
    The Footnote Dump, in short, risks offending the referee (though, if my experience is any guide, the risk, or the offense, isn’t that great).

    Reply

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