Peer review · Lesson 3 of 3

Being reviewed, and where review fails

Respond point by point, change what should change, and disagree with reasons rather than by silence.

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Receiving reviews is unpleasant even when they are right. The useful sequence: read them, do nothing for a day, then read them as information rather than as verdict.

Then respond point by point. For each comment: what you changed and where, or why you disagree, with reasons. Editors read response letters closely, and a clear one carries a revision.

You are allowed to disagree. A reviewer can misunderstand, can want a different paper, or can be wrong. The way to disagree is to explain your reasoning, acknowledge the concern, and where possible make something clearer so the next reader does not have the same reaction — because if one expert misread it, the writing contributed.

What not to do: silently ignore a point, make a cosmetic change and claim it addressed a substantive one, or be combative. Also: do not accept a change that makes the paper wrong. Capitulating to a reviewer you believe is mistaken produces a worse paper with your name on it.

Major revisions means the conclusions need work; minor means details. Rejection frequently means wrong venue rather than worthless work.

Where the system fails is worth knowing plainly: reviewers who are unqualified, slow, or protecting their own position; bias by name, institution, country and language, which double-blind mitigates imperfectly; novelty favoured over reliability, which contributes directly to the replication problems in module 17; and the labour being unpaid and invisible, which is also why reviews vary so much in quality.

See it happen

A reviewer asks you to add an analysis you believe is inappropriate for your design.

The read that arrives on its own

Add it — the reviewer decides whether this gets published, and refusing risks rejection.

The same situation, with this idea

You respond rather than comply: "We have not added the proposed analysis, because it assumes independence between observations that our nested design violates, which would produce misleadingly narrow intervals. To address the underlying concern we have added a multilevel model reported in Table 4, and we now state the nesting explicitly in the methods." You addressed the concern, explained the disagreement, and did not put something wrong in your own paper.

After this, you can

answer the concern behind a request when you cannot accept the request itself.

The takeaway

Respond point by point, change what should change, and disagree with reasons rather than by silence.

Easy to take the wrong way

That disagreeing with a reviewer is risky. A reasoned disagreement that addresses the underlying concern is normal and usually respected.

Try this

Take a criticism you have received and write the response: what you would change, what you would not, and the reason.