rebuttal-and-response-to-reviewers

Responding to Reviewers

The audience of a response is the editor or area chair, who must decide quickly whether concerns were addressed. Make every reply easy to verify: quote the concern, answer it directly, show the change with a location.

Step 1: Triage (before writing anything)

Split every review into atomic comments and classify each in a table:

ID	Reviewer	Comment (short)	Type	Effort	Plan
R1.1	1	Missing baseline X	Experiment	High	Run X on 2 datasets
R2.3	2	Claim in §4 overstated	Wording	Low	Soften + add limitation

Types: misunderstanding (the text was unclear), missing analysis/experiment, wording/presentation, disagreement on substance, out of scope, factual error by reviewer.

Then:

• Identify the 2-3 concerns that drive the scores (often shared across reviewers). These get the most effort and appear first in a conference rebuttal.
• Decide what is feasible in the revision window. Never promise experiments you will not run.
• Note conflicts between reviewers so the editor can adjudicate.

Step 2: Do the work, then write

Run the experiments and edit the manuscript before drafting replies, so every reply can point to a concrete change. Keep a change log with section/page/line numbers.

Step 3: Reply patterns

Journal response letter (no strict length):

Reviewer 1, Comment 1: "<quote or faithful summary of the concern>"

Response: We thank the reviewer for ... [direct answer in the first sentence].
We have [action]. The new results (Table 3, p. 7, lines 210-224) show ...

Change in manuscript: "<quoted new/revised text>" (Section 4.2, p. 7)

Best practices:

• Answer in the first sentence ("Yes, we have added...", "We agree and have...", "We respectfully disagree because...").
• Thanks once per reviewer, not before every comment.
• Quote revised text so the reviewer need not hunt for it. Provide a tracked-changes/diff version if the journal allows.
• Number comments (R1.1, R1.2 ...) and cross-reference instead of repeating ("see our response to R2.1").

Disagreeing (it is allowed and expected when justified):

1. Acknowledge the underlying concern ("We understand the concern that ...").
2. Give evidence: data, citations, a small additional analysis, or a precise explanation.
3. Make a concession where honest: a clarification in the text or a stated limitation. Never be sarcastic, never say the reviewer "failed to understand". Rewrite the text so the next reader won't.

Conference rebuttal (hard limits: characters/words per reviewer or one page; check the venue):

• Lead with a short general response covering shared concerns and new results.
• Then per reviewer, only the comments that affect the decision, 2-5 sentences each.
• Put new numbers in compact tables. State exactly what will change in the camera-ready.
• Correct factual misreadings politely with pointers ("Section 3.2, Eq. 4 defines ...").
• Respect the venue's rules on new experiments, links and supplementary material. Many prohibit external links or new PDFs during rebuttal.
• On OpenReview discussions: reply promptly and concisely, and summarize the resolved points for the AC near the end.

Step 4: Cover note to the editor (journals)

Summarize the main changes in 3-6 bullets, flag any reviewer disagreements you could not resolve and why, and confirm all co-authors approved the revision.

Quality checklist

• Every comment has a response. Count them against the triage table.
• Every "we have added/changed" is actually in the manuscript at the cited location.
• New numbers match between response, manuscript, tables and abstract.
• Tone: professional, specific, never defensive. Read it as the reviewer would.
• No new claims beyond what the revised evidence supports.
• Length within the venue limit (count it).

Related skills

peer-review (reviewing others' work: useful to anticipate criticism), scientific-writing, ml-paper-writing, scientific-critical-thinking, statistical-analysis.