The Writing Place

Take a line or two to thank the editor and reviewers for their helpful commentary and provide a brief indication of how the letter will be organized (e.g., “In what follows I offer a summary of the main revisions made to the manuscript in light of the extremely helpful comments and suggestions I received from you and the external reviewers”).

The main purpose of the letter is to provide an overview of your revisions that can help guide time-pressed reviewers. To make life as easy as possible, consider the following strategies:

• Restate, in your own words, what you believe the concerns of the reviewers to be. This will oblige you to think carefully about what the reviewers have written and will indicate that you have successfully internalized their suggestion or criticism.
• Number/categorize your responses. You may wish to categorize your responses under headings (see exercise on categorizing sample reviewer comments). The Editor’s decision letter also may provide guidance on how to organize your responses.

• show the revisions that have been made: quote your newly revised text so as to make it abundantly clear to the reader what exactly has changed.  Note that the level of detail here varies significantly by discipline and even journal. Whenever possible, consult with others who have published in the journal previously.

It is sometimes difficult (even impossible) to take up all of the reviewers’ suggestions, either because of space constraints or legitimate disagreement.  In such cases you need to add a few paragraphs spelling out in detail why those suggestions were laid aside. It is generally not sufficient to cite space constraints alone, as reviewers may wonder why their particular concerns were de-prioritized in favor of others.

Close by thanking the reviewers and editors again for their constructive criticism. Too often we think of reviewers as just barriers standing in the way of our getting something published. But reviewers provide the invaluable service of reading your work with a fresh eye and offering avenues for improving it. Make sure you acknowledge this in closing (Example: “Thank you again for invitation to revise and resubmit my manuscript. I very much appreciate the time you and the reviewers took to engage my work, and I learned a lot by working through all of the comments and suggestions I received. I hope that the revised manuscript satisfies your concerns and I look forward to your decision”).

Generally speaking, appealing a decision is not advisable. If the appeal is mismanaged or frivolously motivated then you risk alienating the editor of a publication that you may wish to submit to again in the future. Moreover, final decisions are almost never reversed, so authors need to make sure that any appeal is extremely well grounded. In any case, graduate students should ALWAYS consult with their advisors or other departmental faculty prior to making any kind of appeal.

Appeal letters generally take one of two forms, which are in the next two drop-down items.

Challenging the reviewers carries substantial risk. The Editor has devoted time and thought to selecting reviewers, and a complaint against the reviewer could also be interpreted as a complaint against the editor’s judgment. An appeal of this kind should only be made if the reviewer has been demonstrably negligent in the extreme. Also, be careful what you wish for: if a case can be made that the reviewer was negligent, the article will be sent out again to a new reviewer(s). The outcome might well be the same and valuable time may be lost, time during which the work might have been sent to another journal.

In this case, the author might agree with the criticisms made by the reviewers but disagree with the editor that they amount to grounds for rejection. In such cases, the author will often point to positive remarks made by the reviewers, or moments where those same reviewers persist in pointing to the paper’s continued promise. Because this kind of appeal involves a more direct challenge to the editor’s judgment, the risks involved are obvious. Also, remember that reviewers will often preface their criticisms with some (usually vague) words of praise out of respect for the effort the author has put in (“This is an intelligently written and well-researched manuscript on an interesting topic. Nevertheless…”). These words of praise are not necessarily disingenuous, but you need to consider carefully just how much weight they carry, especially if they are followed by detailed, substantive criticism.

Generally, when assessing criticism, pay attention to whether the criticism pertains to every section of the article or only to the early sections. If the latter, it may well be that the reviewer had already found enough significant flaws in the early sections that they deemed a discussion of all subsequent problems unnecessary. In such cases, any kind of appeal would likely be futile.