How to revise your paper.

Congratulations! Your manuscript is being revised for resubmission to a journal. That means you have in hand reviewer comments.

Response to reviewers

Most journals require you, when submitting a revision, to give a point-by-point response to the editor's and reviewers' comments and concerns.

First thing to do when planning what changes to make is to copy and paste the editor and reviewer comments into your Response to Reviewer file. At the top, write something like "We thank the Editor and Reviewers for their helpful feedback. We respond to their comments point-by-point below; reviewer comments in black text, our response in blue italic text."

Next, go through the comments point-by-point. Every comment should be responded to with something akin to "This is a good point. We address this in our revision by..." and then discuss a change to, e.g., the text, or method comparisons, or results.

If the reviewer misunderstood something, feel free to clarify without being condescending.

Edit the manuscript

In the same Overleaf folder, make a new document file, and include red text annotations for modified text. Then, step through the point-by-point response and execute each of them in the manuscript.

Scope

Some of the concerns raised will lead to reasonable additional runs of the methods. Some will lead to unreasonable extensions. Although it is a personal choice about whether a particular request is in scope, a general rule of thumb is that, if the revisions take more than three months, they are unreasonable.