Guides · Submitting and peer review

Responding to reviewers: planning a revision and the response letter

A revise-and-resubmit involves two jobs: deciding what to change, and writing a response document that shows each change. Authors and editors who have written about the process advise sorting comments into critical, contestable and tangential before rewriting, answering every point directly and politely, and keeping the paper's core idea rather than trying to satisfy every request. This advice comes from editorials and authors' accounts, not from studies of which responses succeed.

What a revise-and-resubmit decision means

A revision invitation means the editor judged that the paper's promise outweighs its problems. It does not mean acceptance is likely. The Journal of Marketing's editor described two outcomes after review that stop short of rejection: a reject-and-resubmit, where authors are expected to write what amounts to a new manuscript, and a major, risky revision. He also reported that more than 97% of reviewer recommendations were to reject, and that he treats reviews as advisory and sometimes overrules them.^[1]

At the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, papers with mixed reviews go to an area editor. The editor put the chance of publication for a paper reaching that stage at roughly 30–40%. Each later round goes back to the reviewers, the area editor and the editor, so the people you are answering are the people who will judge the revision.^[2]

Decision letters can come with explicit warnings. One author team received a revision invitation that the editor labelled high risk, with first-round reviewer concerns running to 15 single-spaced pages. The paper went through three revise-and-resubmit rounds before acceptance, and the authors spent 16 of the 24 months between submission and acceptance on revisions.^[3]

Read the reviews before you react

Agarwal and coauthors describe the first step as working out what each reviewer actually means: what they agree with, who agrees with whom, and what they reject outright. Their early readings needed cooling-off periods. They let themselves voice frustration only among trusted colleagues, never to the editor, so that their eventual responses could be unemotional and logical.^[3]

Noble suggests a similar device for the response itself. Write a first draft in which you work out what each reviewer meant, weigh the cost of extra analyses and vent if you need to. Set it aside, then write the version the reviewers will see a few days later, ideally after some of the work is done.^[4]

Sort every comment before you rewrite

Instead of working through the reviews in the order they arrived, the Agarwal team built one document that grouped concerns by theme, such as framing, each hypothesis, definitions, data, model testing and results, with notes on how they would respond. Grouping showed where the editor and reviewers converged, helped set priorities, and later made both the rewrite and the response easier to draft.^[3]

They then placed each comment in one of three bins, and warn that misclassifying a comment is costly in both directions:^[3]

• Critical: comments about the clarity, contribution or logic of the paper. Treating one of these as minor can jeopardise the next round.^[3]
• Contestable: comments that deserve serious thought but where, after debate, you may keep your approach. The authors did this when a reviewer advised splitting the paper into two or three smaller ones.^[3]
• Tangential: questions that may be interesting but lie outside the paper's intended contribution. Treating them as critical wastes effort and blurs the paper's focus; the authors moved such issues to suggestions for future research and explained that choice to the editor and reviewers.^[3]
• For coauthored papers, they also recommend giving each block of concerns a lead author, chosen by comparative advantage, and having one coauthor act as project manager who keeps the team to agreed deadlines.^[3]

Keep the paper's core idea

The most instructive part of the Agarwal account is a mistake. In their first revision the authors tried to satisfy every concern and integrate every suggested literature. The result was judged longer and less readable, with arguments that strayed from the main story, and one reviewer became more pessimistic. In the second revision they returned to their core ideas and evaluated each comment against them. Their conclusion is to take reviewers very seriously without giving up the paper's central idea, even if that means disagreeing with a reviewer's view of what the paper should be.^[3]

That stance carries risk. The authors knew that keeping their framing could cost them a reviewer's support, and one reviewer was never persuaded; the editor used his discretion to accept. The Journal of Marketing's editor likewise states that he may overrule reviewer recommendations.^[3][1]

Protecting the idea is not the same as protecting a weak contribution. One marketing editor reports that many manuscripts are rejected after a few rounds of revision because they still do not show an adequate contribution to the literature. A revision that fixes every listed point can still fail if the contribution stays unclear, which is why the Agarwal team counted making the key contributions stand out as part of the intellectual work of revising.^[5][3]

How to disagree with a reviewer

Disagreement is legitimate, but it has to be argued. The Agarwal team held their ground on contestable points and set out their reasoning to the editor and reviewers. Whatever the tone of the comment, they aimed for responses that were emotionless, objective and persuasive, especially where they disagreed or judged a point tangential.^[3]

Noble adds a tactical point. When a reviewer asks for an analysis you consider uninformative, you are usually in a stronger position if you run it, report the result in the response and then explain why it does not belong in the paper. Saying a request is beyond the paper's scope is acceptable, but if you decline most of a reviewer's requests on that ground you are unlikely to satisfy them.^[4]

When requests conflict, for example a reviewer wants more material while the editor wants a shorter paper, Noble suggests offering to make the change if the editor agrees. Concerns about a reviewer's motives, conflicts of interest or requests that contradict journal policy belong in a separate letter to the editor, not in the reply to that reviewer.^[4]

What the response document should contain

Noble argues that authors often put too little effort into the response itself, and that an unclear one can lead to misunderstandings and even the rejection of a strong paper. His rules and the Agarwal team's practice point to this structure:^[4][3]

• Open with an overview of the main changes, including new data and analyses, and note any criticism raised by more than one reviewer.^[4]
• Reproduce the complete reviews in their original order with your answers interleaved, and split a point into separate answers if it contains two issues.^[4][3]
• Answer every point. Reviewers often complain that authors ignored some of their comments, and skipping a difficult one does not make it go away.^[4]
• Begin each answer with a direct reply, yes or no where possible, and say plainly when the reviewer is right; give background afterwards.^[4]
• Make each change easy to check: say exactly what changed, give line numbers and state whether they refer to the old or the revised version, and make clear whether text is new or was already there.^[4]
• Separate the review, your reply and the changed manuscript text visually, for example through typeface, colour or indentation.^[4]
• Decide whether to quote or summarise. Noble recommends quoting revised text so the response stands on its own, except for changes too long to quote. The Agarwal team avoided duplicating manuscript text: for each comment they restated what the reviewer said, gave their interpretation and pointed to where the manuscript changed, showing reviewers where they agreed or disagreed with one another. Either way, a reviewer should see quickly what you did.^[4][3]

Tone: assume the misunderstanding is partly yours

Noble's advice on tone rests on self-interest as much as courtesy. If a reviewer misunderstood something, part of the fault probably lies with how the paper explained it, and a reviewer who is not an expert may represent many of the journal's readers. He recommends apologising for the lack of clarity, revising the text even when you think it was already clear, and never answering a rude review in kind.^[4]

The Agarwal team reached a similar place by another route. Rereading the manuscript with some distance, they came to see that the reviewers were trying to help, and they credit every comment, including those they did not implement, with improving the paper.^[3]

What this advice rests on

All of these sources are editorials or authors' essays. Noble writes for computational biologists, the Agarwal team describes one paper's path through a management journal, and the Journal of Marketing and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science figures are the editors' own reports from the mid-2010s. None of them tests which kinds of response lead to acceptance, so treat the advice as experienced judgement rather than evidence.^[4][3][1][2]

References

1. V. Kumar (2016). My Reflections on Publishing in Journal of Marketing. Journal of Marketing.
2. Robert W. Palmatier (2016). Editorial: the past, present, and future of JAMS. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.
3. Rajshree Agarwal, Raj Echambadi, April M. Franco, MB Sarkar (2006). Reap Rewards: Maximizing Benefits from Reviewer Comments. Academy of Management Journal, 49(2), 191–196.
4. William Stafford Noble (2017). Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Response to Reviewers. PLOS Computational Biology, 13(10), e1005730.
5. Cheng Lu Wang (2022). Editorial – The misassumptions about contributions. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 16(1), 1–2.

Bibliographic details only. Follow the DOI to read each study at its publisher.