Updated August 23rd, 2023
So your scientific manuscript has been peer-reviewed and you have received a response from the editors of the journal you submitted it to. If it wasn’t rejected, this means that you likely received some (or many) comments from the reviewers. Now you need to write a rebuttal letter that includes all your responses to the reviewers comments and prepare your revised manuscript.
At the beginning of my scientific career, I found it difficult to structure my rebuttal letters well. Over time, it has become easier for me, because they actually always have the same structure. Therefore, in this article I will give you a detailed guide on how to write the best academic rebuttal letter for peer review.
Thinks to Keep in Mind Before You Start Writing a Rebuttal Letter
Before you start typing, we need to clarify a few things. These are less about content and more about how your answer will sound and how you will approach it:
- Be polite. Most reviewers volunteer their “work”. This means that they have written the review of your article in their free time. Maybe late at night or early in the morning before work (as I like to do). They are all human and make mistakes. Make sure that the tone of your rebuttal letter is polite and corresponds to your scientific state.
- Be professional. Adding to the first point, don´t take anything personally. Write professional answers and politely explain if you see something differently.
- Be thorough. Carefully read all the comments and respond to each one. Take each reviewer and each of their comments seriously. Leaving some out may not reflect well on your scientific rebuttal letter.
So now that you are ready to write a polite, professional and thorough rebuttal letter, what should you write? The answer follows here:
Simple Structure of a Rebuttal Letter for Peer Review
Let´s dive right into how to structure your responses to the reviewer comments. Following I present you a simple general structure for a scientific rebuttal letter. Please note, that these are my experiences with medical journals. If you´re doing research in another scientific field, these may vary. Also, there are some journals that may have specific templates or other requirements, such as reviewer-specific responses that you have to enter into an online form.
Nevertheless, the simplest structure of a scientific rebuttal letter consists of three parts:
- An opening paragraph
- The reviewer comments
- The authors responses
In the following paragraphs, I will shortly discuss each one of these important parts of your rebuttal letter for peer review.
1. The Opening Paragraph of your Academic Rebuttal Letter
You created a blank word document to write your rebuttal letter. Now you want to address the editors and reviewers. Imagine you are building a bridge. From the journal´s response (that includes the comments of the editors and reviewers) towards your rebuttal letter. Think about some aspects of the journal and how the peer review process went. This is your chance to write some thankful and polite words to everyone involved.
Template for the Opening Paragraph of your Rebuttal Letter
The opening paragraph of your rebuttal letter could look like this template:
To the Editorial Board of [JOURNAL NAME]: We appreciate the rapid processing of our manuscript and the constructive comments of the editors and reviewers. The quality of the reviews provided reflects the highest scientific standards of the journal. We have tried to incorporate all suggestions and to address all comments relevant to the new manuscript format in a concise manner. We believe that the manuscript has been considerably strengthened as a result. We hope you will be convinced that your readers will find our contribution as significant as we do. Please see below for details:
Of course, you should customize this to make it unique. It would be best to add some information or wording to make it more appropriate for your manuscript/topic.
2. How to Include the Reviewer’s Comments in Your Rebuttal Letter
The reviewer’s comments are the backbone of your scientific rebuttal letter. Your whole response should shimmy along these comments. I always suggest organizing all responses first by person and then by comment. If the editors also wrote some comments, you will want to start with them and number them consecutively. The editor’s comments are then followed by the reviewer’s comments in your rebuttal letter. The structure should be clear enough that it is easy to identify individual comments and follow the thought process in your responses.
Often, the reviewers responses begin with an opening paragraph that summarizes your work and includes a general assessment. Note that you break the responses down into comments/thoughts, not sentences. Therefore, you can think of this first paragraph as one comment that requires only one response.
Template for the Reviewer’s Comments in Your Rebuttal Letter
After separating all comments, and numbering them consecutively, it yould look like this:
E = Editor, R = Reviewer
E-1:
Feedback from three reviewers is provided. Reviewers were convinced of […]. However, some are critical of […].
E-2:
Please move Figure X to the supplement, as there is great redundancy with Table X.
R1-1:
I like to thank the authors for presenting their manuscript entitled: “…”
They evaluate XXX and provide a well-written manuscript with sound analysis. However, there are some major and minor issues that need to be addressed before publication can be considered.
R1-2:
[…]
R2-1:
In the manuscript entitled “…”, the authors analyze data from XXX patients with the hypothesis: “…”. They found […] and they conclude […].
R2-2:
[…]
Structuring all the comments will make it easier for you to respond to each comment. It also makes it easier to divide the work among multiple authors if it was done in a research group.
3. How to Write Responses to the Reviewer’s Comments in Your Rebuttal Letter for Peer Review
Now it’s time to get down to business. Your responses are, as expected, the most important part of your rebuttal letter to a scientific journal. I cannot provide you with your specific answers to the queries you received. However, I can give you a well-structured outline and some tips that will help you to write a great scientific rebuttal letter.
First, lets go back to the second paragraph of this article. Keep in mind to be polite, professional and thorough. Many researchers (myself included) and thus also reviewers have certain narcissistic traits. Additionally, there is some sort of power imbalance. As a researcher that is under pressure to publish, you somewhat depend on the favor of the reviewers and editors. Therefore, you want to affirm these people and in no way offend them. Below is a brief sampling of the responses (beginnings) I have written and received in over 100 peer reviews:
How to Start Your Responses to the Reviewer’s Comments
- We like to thank Reviewer 1 for this comment.
- Thank you for this suggestion.
- Thank you for your comment.
- You raise an important question.
- We agree with Reviewer 1 as this is an important objection.
- Reviewer 1 has raised an important question.
- We thank Reviewer for this thoughtful comment.
- Thanks a lot for your comments and suggestions
You get the direction. Be polite and take the reviewer´s comments seriously. That way, the overall tone of your response is positive, and maybe the responses will be positive, too. If you find yourself using the same phrase over and over, you could also ask ChatGPT to give you some alternatives. I have received more than one rebuttal letter where all the replies start the same way. This looks like the authors did not put too much effort into it and made me read and follow each change more carefully.
Disclaimer: If you are using ChatGPT, make sure to just get your ideas from it and don´t blindly copy and paste its output. There may be wrong or even plagiarized content. If you want to use it, check it first using tools such as PlagiaShield.
So, now we want to put the comments and answers together:
Template for Your Responses to the Reviewer’s Comments in Your Rebuttal Letter
After adding your answers to each comment, your answer will look something like this:
E-1:
Feedback from three reviewers is provided. Reviewers were convinced of […]. However, some are critical of […].
Response to E-1:
We like thank the Editor for these comments. […]
E-2:
Please move Figure X to the supplement, as there is great redundancy with Table X.
Response to E-2:
Figure X was moved to the supplement as suggested. […]
R1-1:
I like to thank the authors for presenting their manuscript entitled: “…”
They evaluate XXX and provide a well-written manuscript with sound analysis. However, there are some major and minor issues that need to be addressed before publication can be considered.
Response to R1-1:
We thank Reviewer 1 for […].
Using a structure like this makes it easy for the reader (and yourself) to navigate through the comments and read your individual responses to the comments. An easy-to-read structure is very important because it makes it easier for the reader to access the content. It also shows that you have been thorough and have made an effort to create a quality response.
How to Deal with Criticism in the Peer Reviewer´s Comments
The purpose of the review process is, to ensure the quality and validity of the research by having it reviewed by other experts in the field. However, as always in life, there may and will be differing opinions on the same subject. As a result, almost every review process will confront you with comments you don’t like or maybe even don’t understand. Lets again go back to the first paragraph of this acticle – be professional.
Try not to take things personally, even if the comments of the reviewers sound unreasonably critical to you. This is actually one of the hardest parts. Think of the review as a chance to develop and get free different perspectives on your work.
I can think of several times when I thought, “Man, why does the reviewer want me to do so much extra work?“. For example, when a reviewer asked for additional readers and an inter-rater reliability assessment. However, when I did this for my study, I found that there were variables that were more reliable than others. Having these additional results and being able to include and discuss them in my manuscript greatly strengthened the validity of my study.
But how do you politely face criticism in your rebuttal letter? In the following paragraph, I want to give a few examples.
Useful Phrases for Criticism and Justification in the Rebuttal Letter
- This is an important objection. However, we tried to […]
- We agree with Reviewer 1 that this analysis would be a great suggestion. However, this extents the scope of our study.
- Thank you for this excellent suggestion. Unfortunately, our data do not allow for […].
- This is a great suggestion that needs to be addressed in future studies on this subject.
- We are grateful for this objection and we clarified this matter in […]. However, we were not able to […].
If you are not able to do an additional analysis of a certain type, there is a little “trick” (if you want to call it that) .If a reviewer thinks there’s something missing that would be a great addition to your paper, but you can’t provide it – that’s a limitation. And by realizing that, you can add this point to the limitations section of your manuscript:
- We thank Reviewer 1 for suggesting this additional analysis. However, we were not able to do this with our data. To include this relevant point, we have added it as a limitation in the limitations section.
Additionally, if more than one reviewer expressed the same concern, you can just refer to your respective response:
- Thank you for your suggestion. Since this was also mentioned by Reviewer 1, we have added this information in the XX section. Please also see our response to R1-3.
Helpful Stylistic Additions to Your Rebuttal Letter for Peer Review
Something I always love to see as a reviewer is when the rebuttal letter is not just blocks of plain text. Although I strongly suggest a structured rebuttal letter as shown in this article, you also have your “artistic” or “scientific” freedom in your responses. Every reader loves to read white space, likes to see images and list posts. In this context, a rebuttal letter does not differ too much from blog articles where you need to incorporate theses (SEO) strategies to enable great content.
If you have an additional figure or graph that adds to the discussion, include it in the rebuttal letter. Maybe the reviewer asked for a subgroup analysis – you can show the results and argue why you think it needs to be in the manuscript (or not).
You can also add your arguments or reasoning in list posts. I had a paper where the reviewers did not give much feedback other than that there are similar studies out there. My response was a detailed 10-point list of arguments, why our study adds to the scientific knowledge and how it differs from the previous studies.
That being said, if you have a solid structure in your rebuttal letter, you will also have some freedom to play with and convince the editors and reviewers of the importance of your study.
How to Incorporate the Changes Discussed in the Rebuttal Letter into the Revised Manuscript
Preparing the revised manuscript for your scientific peer review process is a topic in itself. Therefore, we will only briefly discuss some of the relevant points in this paragraph. (I may even write a separate article on this topic.)
Most journals want you to highlight each change in the revised manuscript. The easiest way is, to enable “track changes” in your word processing software (e.g., Microsoft Word). While you write your responses to each one of the reviewer comments, you will also do the respective changes in your manuscript.
And for each (completed) change, you should add a comment. That comment is to indicate which changes have been as a response to which comment. In this matter, useful phrases for comments in your revised manuscript could be:
- In response to R2-5
- Changes made in response to R1-1
- Deleted as suggested in E1-3
- Added/moved in response to R2-1
Not only does this greatly improve the readability and traceability of your changes to reviewers and editors. This also really helps if you´re not the only person working on the revision of your manuscript.
The more clearly you write your answers and annotate your changes, the easier it is for your colleagues to understand and possibly edit your comments and changes. As a result, you will be able to create the best possible rebuttal letter and revised manuscript. This way, your chances of getting your manuscript accepted may increase along with your changes.
Happy writing!
For further information: If you´re publishing in radiology sciences, find an overview of the best radiology journals here.
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