Guidelines for Revision Response Document

Authors invited to submit a revision must provide responses to editors’ and reviewers’ feedback.

Authors should follow these guidelines for their response documents:

1. Start with a summary of major changes to the paper.

   • The summary needs to be succinct, typically no more than two pages.

2. Provide point-by-point responses to the comments from the editors and reviewers:

    

   • Use the response document to explain how the feedback was addressed: The response document provides the opportunity for authors to engage in a scholarly conversation with the review panel and explain why choices were made.

   • Write concisely: Do not cut-and-paste entire segments of the paper (e.g., paragraphs of texts, tables, figures) into the response document. Instead, mention explicitly where in the paper the change was made. Likewise, do not repeat the same response multiple times if raised by multiple members of the team. Instead, respond to the first instance of the issue and then refer back to that response when faced with the same issue.

3. Length of the response document

   • Avoid overly long response documents. On average, the total length of a paper’s responses should be roughly similar to the total length of the review team’s comments. If a paper receives 10 single-spaced pages of comments from the review panel, the length of the response document (reviews plus responses) should generally be no more than 20 single-spaced pages.
   • Additional back-up information may be requested by editors to be included in the response document but not in the paper.

Authors may find the following editorial useful in preparing their response documents (see p. vii, Writing the Response Document as Scholarly Conversation): The First Revision