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Tips & resources on how to respond to reviewer comments?

In our newest “how can we help you?” thread, a reader writes:

Does anyone have general thoughts, or know of online resources that they can point me to, on how to most effectively respond to reviewers’ comments on one’s submitted articles? I’ve published a small handful of articles so far, and I’m noticing that I tend to go “overboard” when revising (a referee made a comment to this effect), which creates more work for me, and also, perhaps, for referees, who now have a substantively changed paper to review. The difficult is probably most significant when reviewer comments are vague (“connect to x literature” without providing specific references to engage with).

Any thoughts on how to revise effectively without over-revising would be appreciated.

I’m not sure if we’ve ever discussed this issue in detail before here at the Cocoon. I just try to give reviewers enough descriptive detail to give them the core of how I’ve addressed each of their concerns, citing which pages of the manuscript make the revised claims in question along the way.

Do any readers have any tips of their own or know of any good resources for the OP?

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2 responses to “Tips & resources on how to respond to reviewer comments?”

  1. Daniel

    There’s more to say about this than I think I can reasonably write in a blog comment, but a lot of how I approach this can be summed up by saying that I put myself in the reviewer’s shoes and ask what I would want if I were the reviewer. For example, you wouldn’t want someone to go overboard in response to one of your comments, would you? So don’t go overboard yourself. (If you WOULD want someone to go overboard, you are probably expecting too much from the people whose papers you are reviewing. Scale back your expectations on others and you might be less likely to impose those expectations on yourself.)

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  2. Anonymous

    Collaborating with people who have publishing experience can be a good way to learn norms (but not, per an earlier post, necessarily with an advisor!). I agree with Marcus and Daniel to be clear and informative about what you did to change the paper based on their feedback, or provide a brief explanation of why you didn’t make a change (i.e., it falls outside the scope of the paper, it contradicted with feedback from another reviewer, etc.). It is okay to say “this is a really interesting idea/suggestion that I don’t have space to fully explore in this paper but will consider for my future work on this topic” if a reviewer makes a general suggestion to consider another topic/angle/literature but doesn’t make a specific suggestion for why it is necessary for the current paper to meet its aims.

    Also, I often try to match the tone of the review itself. One that is less respectful to me usually garners a slightly more frosty reply from me. But overall, stay professional and focused. You don’t have to make every change a reviewer suggests, but if you think a reviewer misread you and therefore their comment isn’t appropriate, rather than telling them this, it may be worth considering whether their misreading is an indication that you could be clearer about your point. Sometimes I’ll say things like “the reviewer’s suggestion to do X helped me see that my argument was unclear about Y and so I made these edits to improve clarity.” In that case, I may not adopt the reviewer’s specific suggestion, which was off target, but I did make some changes.

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