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How to respond to reviewers’ comments: A practical guide for authors

An open envelope to represent how to respond to reviewers’ commentsIn February 2020, Nature announced that it would give authors the option to publish their referee reports and responses to reviewers. Though this change is only a trial for this journal, other Nature Research journals have opened the peer-review process. I applaud the effort of these and other journals to make peer review more transparent, and hope it will become a standard.

Whether you publish your referee reports with your paper or not, how you respond to reviewers’ comments on submitted articles is essential to publication.

It is true that the journal editor will decide whether to accept or reject your manuscript based on the scientific integrity of the work you are reporting. However, your response to reviewers and the journal editor will steer the journal editor’s decision-making process. So, a well-crafted letter to reviewers can only work in your favor.

But how should you reply to reviewers to convince them your paper should be published in your target journal? The following advice should guide you in the right direction, no matter the type of criticism you received from peer reviewers.

The right mindset drives the right response to reviewers

Before you respond to reviewers’ comments, celebrate three good things that happened to you:

  1. Your research paper was deemed good enough to be sent to peer review.
  2. The peer reviewers carved time out of their schedules to evaluate your work for free.
  3. Your paper was not rejected, and you were either invited to revise and resubmit or your paper was accepted with minor or major changes.

Now you can move on. Prepare to accept the criticism from your peers—it is an essential part of getting published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Getting detailed reviewer reports is a good thing. It means the reviewers have done a thorough job of finding the weak spots of your paper and are giving you the chance to improve your paper.

Getting a harsh reviewer is possible, but it doesn’t happen often if you submit papers to top scholarly journals. Most reviewers are helpful and offer constructive criticism, but they don’t waste much ink praising the manuscript. Remember they are doing the work for no remuneration, and the best use of their time is to make comments that will improve your manuscript, not boost your ego.

So, prepare to receive more criticism than praise before you respond to reviewers’ comments.

While a helpful review summarizes the major positives and details the negatives of a manuscript, in general, most reviewer comments are negative. Or, you’ll perceive them as negative. This doesn’t mean your paper has more weaknesses than strengths. It means that the reviewer has to detail your paper’s limitations, as these—not its strong points—need to be addressed by your revision.

Revise the manuscript before you respond to reviewers’ comments

It usually takes so long to receive feedback from the journal editor after submitting a paper that once you finally have their response in your inbox, you get defensive and inpatient. You are tempted to jump right into replying to the journal editor to defend every bit of your original submission and list your reasons for disagreeing with the reviewers.

If this situation looks familiar, you may not be ready to respond to reviewers’ comments just yet. To cool off, read the article “The Five Stages of Rejection”. It will prepare you to face the processes of revision and responding to reviewers.

When you’re finally ready to deal with the reviewers’ comments in a professional, objective manner, discuss the peer review reports with your co-authors. Decide which changes to accept and which to rebut, revise the paper, and only then start writing your responses to reviewers.

Practical advice for responding to reviewers’ comments

This section is based mainly on my experience as an author and freelance editor, and is supported by information I gathered from the hyperlinked resources.

1. Say thanks

Begin by thanking the reviewer for their comments and advice.

2. Summarize the revisions you made

Specify that you’ve addressed all of the reviewer’s concerns and summarize the changes you made.

Addressing a reviewer’s comment doesn’t mean you made the change the reviewer suggested. It means that you’ve considered it and either made the change or explained why you chose not to.

3. Make your answers easy to see

List all the reviewer’s comments and your answer to each one. Use a different font or color to highlight your responses. This makes the text easier to scan.

4. Avoid giving yes or no answers

Even if you’ve been asked to make minor changes, such as correcting a misspelled word, respond to reviewers’ comments with “We’ve corrected the typo” or “This was an oversight. We’ve corrected the error.” If it’s a more serious mistake, you may also want to add “We apologize for our error”.

5. Whenever possible, make your responses self-contained

The reviewer or editor shouldn’t have to peruse the manuscript to find a change you made. So, instead of “We’ve made the change. See page 5, line 24 of the revised paper”, write “We’ve changed [original text] to [edited text] (page 5, line 24)”.

But if you rewrote an entire paragraph or section, respond, “We have revised the text to address your concerns and hope that it is now clearer. Please see page 5 of the revised manuscript, lines 9–20, and page 6, lines 1–20.”

Remember that the reviewer may only skim through the revised manuscript, but they will likely read all your answers to their comments.

6. Do not omit any concern raised by a reviewer

When you respond to reviewers’ comments, you should address each and every comment—either make the change or reject it and justify your choice.

7. Pick your battles

Even if you don’t agree with a minor change suggested by a reviewer, making the change shows you’re open to suggestions.

8. Be tactful and use supporting evidence

You should always be tactful when answering to peer review comments, but especially so when you disagree with the reviewer. To support your argument, you may use supplementary material, such as figures and tables, that you won’t include in the manuscript. Or, you could share additional evidence with the reviewer and mention it is confidential.

9. Respect your reviewer’s intelligence

When a reviewer fails to understand a point you made, don’t assume they’re ignorant. If they failed to understand something you wrote, it means you’ve failed to express your idea clearly and you confused at least one reader. So, it’s likely the text needs editing for clarity and logic. (More details in the post What to do if the journal editor recommends English language editing services)

10. Respect your reviewer even if it means repeating yourself

Treat each reviewer as if they were the only one. Respond to each referee as if they were the only reviewer of your paper. Do not respond to one reviewer with “Please see our answer to comment 34 of Reviewer #2”.

11. Say thanks again

End the letter to the reviewer with a sentence such as, “We would like to thank the referee again for taking the time to review our manuscript.

How to reply to peer review comments when submitting papers for publication

The length of a response to reviewers’ comments depends on the complexity of the comments—and on how motivated you are to have your paper published in your target journal.

I’ve edited two-page letters to reviewers, and I’ve edited letters that were 30- or 40-page long. A letter to a reviewer should be as long as it needs to be to allow you to prove you’ve considered the criticism you received.

When you agree with a reviewer

This is the simplest case. Acknowledge your mistake and confirm you’ve corrected it.

Here are some examples of answers if you agree with the reviewer:

  • We thank the reviewer for pointing this out. We have revised…
  • We have removed…
  • We agree and have updated…
  • We have fixed the error…
  • This observation is correct. We have changed…
  • We have made the change. The new sentence reads as follows…
  • This was an oversight. We have added…

When you disagree with a reviewer’s comment

Choose your words carefully when drafting your response to revision requests. First, emphasize any part of the reviewer’s comment you agree with. Then explain why you chose not to make the change.

Here are some examples of answers if you disagree with the reviewer:

  • We agree with the reviewer that further elaborating on this point using new data would be helpful. However, we believe that expanding our dataset is neither feasible, given the costs involved, nor would significantly support our argument. For this reason, we chose not to make this change, but we added the following sentence to paragraph 3 in the discussion: “Though having a larger dataset would offer further insight…”.
  • We apologize if our original Figure 2 did not show…. We did not intend to…. We have modified the figure and hope that it is now clear that…. We believe that adding a new figure, as the reviewer suggested, would be unnecessary given that our new Figure 2 shows….
  • We appreciate the reviewer’s insightful suggestion and agree that it would be useful to demonstrate that…; however, such an analysis is beyond the scope of our paper, which aims only to show that…. Nevertheless, we recognize this limitation should be mentioned in the paper, so we added the following sentence….

In sum, whether you agree or disagree with the reviewer, aim to prove that you understood their comments and took them seriously.

What to do when reviewers disagree

When reviewers give you conflicting suggestions, don’t respond to reviewers’ comments, “As another reviewer suggested the opposite, we didn’t change the text”. Make a decision. Pick the suggestion you agree with and justify your choice to the other reviewer.

For example, you could answer, “As we received conflicting advice from another reviewer, we decided to make the change they suggested, because…. We hope this was the right decision.”

How to respond to reviewer comments—journal examples

Here are 10 examples of letters to reviewers (PDF files). Note that the authors who rejected a reviewer’s suggestion provided a valid justification:

To find other reviewer letter examples, check the journals that publish the correspondence between authors, reviewers, and journal editors.

Responding to reviewers: Advice on tone and language from the perspective of a freelance editor

When you respond to reviewers’ comments, maintain a positive attitude and be open to criticism. Your responses will tend to reflect your attitude at the time of writing. Word choice, tone, syntax—they may all reveal to the reader your true colors.

As a freelance editor, I’ve edited letters to reviewers that conveyed the message that their authors did not welcome criticism to their manuscripts. Their tone was overly formal, the sentences too short, and the examples few. These letters needed editing for style to make them sound more like a discussion between professionals than a court defense. And I’ve edited other letters that showed the author genuinely appreciated the reviewers’ comments. The authors of these letters used a positive tone, and their language was less formal and more conversational. The letters in the first category tend to be much shorter than those in the second, and maybe it’s not just a coincidence.

Having to respond to reviewers’ comments is tedious and can be unpleasant, because nobody likes their work to be criticized. But if you see the reviewers’ comments as an opportunity to improve your research paper and get credit for it, responding to reviewers will feel less burdensome.

Do you need a freelance editor for your letters to reviewers or for your manuscript? Send me a message at editor@languageediting.com.

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Last revised on  November 2023

Cristina N.

A freelance editor and writer with a keen interest in science, nature, and communication, I love to craft articles that help and inspire people.