Pick the suggestion you agree with and justify your choice to the other reviewer. For example, you may say something like this, “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 E Reviewer comment: Please revise the conclusion in the abstract to avoid overly causal language. Authors’ Response: To further balance the implications of our results with the potential limitations of observational studies, we have changed “can” to “might” in the Reviewer B’s Comments to Authors: This manuscript tries to identify clinical and endoscopic features that would help predict cancer progression after EMR of Barrett’s esophagus with high grade dysplasia. The following are my comments and critique: General: 1. The manuscript needs to be edited for grammar and syntax. 2. blogger.com Size: 99KB
How to respond to reviewers’ comments: A practical guide for authors – Language Editing
In the previous article in this series 1I provided pointers on what questions to consider and what information to gather to perform a fair and thorough evaluation of all sections of a manuscript. Once you have completed your evaluation of the entire manuscript and identified its strengths and weaknesses, the time arrives to put pen to paper or keystrokes to computer screen and actually create the peer review report that will go back to the editor and authors.
What you communicate to the authors and what you reviewer comments to author example to the editor will not be exactly the same, because these 2 stakeholders need different information and different types of feedback.
Therefore, it is important as you write the manuscript review to understand that you are really writing 2 reviewer comments to author example, although there may be overlap in what you convey to the editor and the author. Therefore, your review must be effective in giving each party the information they need. So, how do you write an effective peer manuscript review? In this article I hope to give you some pointers to achieve this goal.
As a peer reviewer, you have 2 important roles. The first is to inform the authors about the strengths and weaknesses of the submitted paper and to suggest ways that the study could be or could have been improved 1. The second role is to recommend to the editor whether the manuscript should be accepted, rejected, or sent back for revision. Reviewer comments to author example recommendation should be based on the value of the work in relation to what is already known about a topic, whether the question being asked is valid, whether the methods used to answer the question are complete and robust, and whether the answer adds to existing knowledge.
At no point do you make the decision about the disposition of the manuscript. That is the editor's job. Nor do you indicate to the authors whether you are recommending acceptance, rejection, or reconsideration after revision. Your review will be most effective if it does do not say anything that will put the editor in a difficult or no-win situation.
Before you begin to write the review, make sure you are organized in what you want to say and what evidence you are going to present to support your comments to the author and the editor. At a minimum, you want to provide the authors with a a summary of the paper, b a listing of major comments, and c a listing of minor comments, reviewer comments to author example. Try to present your comments in an order that allows the authors to best follow your points.
Finally, write up a separate appraisal of the manuscript along with any special comments, and place these materials in the section of the evaluation form designated for comments to the editor, reviewer comments to author example.
Remember that recommendations regarding suitability for publication go only to the editor. When you organize the review, remember that the editor can see all of your comments to the authors, so there is no reason to paste the same comments into the section containing the comments to the editor. Doing so may seem impressive because you have now doubled the overall length of the peer review report, but you have not added any value. I recommend that you write a summary paragraph describing the content of the manuscript, the hypothesis or goal of the study, the experimental design, the major results, and the conclusions made by the authors.
But why spend time summarizing the paper? Don't the authors know what they wrote about? There are several reasons why adding a paragraph that summarizes the study described in the submitted manuscript can be beneficial to everyone, including you. First, reviewer comments to author example, a summary paragraph indicates to the authors and the editor that you have read the paper and have taken the time to summarize it, reviewer comments to author example. In a subtle way a summary lends greater credibility to your review.
Second, it allows the authors to see whether your interpretation of their hypothesis, experiments, results, and conclusions is consistent with what they intended. Perhaps you have misread or misinterpreted reviewer comments to author example important to the study that the authors can clarify in communications with the editor. Or, maybe the authors will see that their descriptions are unclear and need revision to improve clarity.
Third, the summary allows you to organize your comments as they relate to the hypothesis, reviewer comments to author example, experiments, results, and conclusions as you saw them. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the summary will help you and the editor remember the original manuscript when any revisions come your way. The authors may take weeks or months to revise a manuscript and resubmit it.
Add to this the fact that reviewers and editors are busy people and have other things to occupy their minds. If you also recognize that aging reviewers like me have failing memories, you will quickly realize that your summary, which was part of your original peer review report, reviewer comments to author example, may be the only way for you and perhaps the editor as well to recall the original study and what it was about.
This aid to recall may bring you up to speed more quickly and make your job simpler the second time around. So, think of writing a summary as a useful exercise, rather than something no one will read. Why separate into major and minor comments? Because this separation allows the authors to readily see the issues that were most important to you and that must be addressed.
Splitting your comments into major and minor categories also helps the editor when a revision is submitted, because the editor can better evaluate how well the authors responded to the most important issues regarding the manuscript. An editor may cut authors some slack for minor comments but will expect a higher standard for successfully addressing major comments.
Major comments are those that affect the validity of the study e. Minor comments suggest changes that would add value to the paper e. Of course, you as the reviewer decide which category should apply for each of your comments. Trying to add some order to your comments is helpful for everyone. Why does it matter? Arranging comments in a random manner makes the author and the editor jump back and forth throughout the paper to recognize and understand your points.
To add order to your comments, consider listing your comments so they follow the presentation format used by the particular journal. Wouldn't it be easier for everyone involved to turn the pages or scroll down a computer screen as few times as possible and not have to jump from reviewer comments to author example Results back to the Introduction and then forward to the Discussion and then back to the Methods?
Remember that the authors will respond to your comments in the same order you listed them. So, do you want to have to jump back and forth to try to follow the changes the authors made to a set of your comments for a manuscript you may only partly recollect? Example 1 consists of a set of reviewer's comments for a submitted manuscript on a hypothetical topic. Pretend you are the author receiving these comments or the editor comparing these comments with those from a second reviewer.
Which order would make your life easier? Which presentation style would help you identify the reviewer comments to author example important comments? Avoid writing vague comments. Tell the authors exactly what you are talking about. Remember, you are the one who must re-review the manuscript should a revision be submitted, so this exactness will benefit you if and when you are called upon to evaluate the revised manuscript.
Be specific in your comments. Reviewer comments to author example the authors what you think that they were trying to say.
Do not simply state that experimental details are missing. What details do you want to see? It never hurts to give examples of what you mean. Try to avoid basing your comments on your opinion. You can reduce emotional reactions to your comments by providing specific evidence that supports your comment or proves your point 2.
If you feel that parts of the study are not novel, reviewer comments to author example, cite other published studies that have explored the same problem. Use existing guidelines or expert-panel recommendations to support your comments, reviewer comments to author example.
Cite other articles published in that journal as examples of the standard you expect. If scientists were clairvoyant they would foresee any problems with a manuscript. Although authors are not mind readers, vague comments from reviewers unfortunately can force them to try it. For instance, authors can get frustrated when a reviewer's comments contain broad-stroke criticisms without any recommendations for specific actions, reviewer comments to author example, such as the form additional experiments would take 34.
In The One Minute Manager 5Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson use an analogy that I believe is also a classic example of how reviewer comments to author example author—reviewer interaction often goes, reviewer comments to author example.
Imagine that submitting a manuscript is like the game of bowling. The goal in bowling is to roll a heavy ball at 10 pins, which the bowler can see and has a maximum of 2 rolls to knock them all down. But that would be too simple in the world of publishing.
In this game, the pins are still there, but now a reviewer comments to author example sheet is in front of the pins. Guess who is holding the sheet up, reviewer comments to author example. Yes, the reviewer. An author rolls the ball and hears the crash of pins. How did the author do? Does that sound like reviews you have received in the past?
So be helpful to the authors. The most effective manuscript reviews go beyond just telling authors that they need to make changes or improvements. Effective reviews actually help the authors understand how they can satisfactorily address the deficiencies the reviewer has identified. An effective manuscript review includes concrete suggestions for additional necessary experiments, reviewer comments to author example, how they might be performed, what new experimental details should be added, which statistical analyses might be more appropriate, whether the results can be interpreted in other ways, how the authors can distinguish their work from previous work, reviewer comments to author example, and so forth.
Even if the study has a fatal deficiency that cannot be corrected, try to help the authors learn from the mistake by indicating what the authors should have done during the study. Example 2 2 presents 2 sets of hypothetical comments—one unspecific and unhelpful to the authors and the other specific and helpful. Related to the earlier discussion on your roles as a peer reviewer is recognizing the importance of consistency in what you say to the authors and the editor. Similarly, I have seen many benign reviews that said little about the manuscript but then recommended rejection without providing any evidence to support the recommendation.
This inconsistency puts the editor in a difficult situation. An effective peer review is one in which the comments to the authors and the recommendation to the editor are consistent. Would you like your work to be described with any of these adjectives? As a reviewer comments to author example, you may not have much choice in the deficiencies you point out, but you do have a choice in the tone of the words you use and the way you deliver your message.
So be considerate of the authors. At stake is not only your reputation but also that of the journal you represent. Examples 3 and 4 present comments to the authors and editor for a hypothetical study on the diagnostic accuracy of interleukin-9 in prostate cancer. I tried to be cognizant of my roles as a peer reviewer. I separated my comments to the editor from those to the authors.
Feedback and peer review
, time: 5:43
Reviewer 1 questions the narrow focus of your work. But the consensus at the meeting was that this was fine for a Christmas paper on one specific aspect of smell. Based on the consensus at the meeting, we will keep the focus of the paper on asparagus anosmia. REVIEWERS COMMENTS: Reviewer: 1 Reviewers' comments: Reviewer #1 (Remarks to the Author): This manuscript reports a combined experimental and theoretical study of trop2dad Ru catalyzed conversion of formaldehyde and water to H2 with the presence of base. This catalytic system is the fastest acceptorless formaline dehydrogenation reported so far 7/1/ · Although authors are not mind readers, vague comments from reviewers unfortunately can force them to try it. For instance, authors can get frustrated when a reviewer's comments contain broad-stroke criticisms without any recommendations for specific actions, such as the form additional experiments would take (3, 4).Cited by: 4
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