Thread by @dsquintana

You might be frustrating the people who peer review your revised manuscripts without even realizing it.

Here are some tips on reducing peer review friction from my (limited) experience as an author, reviewer, and associate editor

Copy and paste each reviewer comment (number them yourself if you have to) and respond to each one in turn. Seems like common sense, but I’ve come across many responses in which I have to spend time figuring out which comment the authors are actually responding to

Don’t just write, “We updated the introduction”. Paste in the chunk of text you updated into the response document, also noting it’s location in the manuscript. Some journal systems add line numbers to PDFs. If they don’t, add your own so you can refer to them in your response

Err on adding more info rather than less. I’ve never thought, “That author provided too much info in their response”

It’s fine to disagree with a reviewer, but actually explain why, rather than deferring to your authority in the field. I’ve gotten a response like, “We disagree because we’ve been doing this for 20 years” type response a few times recently. Not a classy move...

Unless the journal explicitly tells you not to, paste figures and tables in relevant sections of the manuscript. Don’t make the reviewer work harder than they need to by making them move back and forth to the end of the document.

I’ve heard of a few people that just do this anyway, even if the journal advises against this. Worst that can happen is that the editorial office returns your submission for correction...

If you can choose your citation style upon first submission (lucky you!) choose an “author, year” in-text citation system so reviewers don’t have to flip to the back to check which paper you cited

Don’t ignore hard-to-address comments thinking that reviewers will miss this. I’ve seen authors try this (it’s always the hard comments they “miss”). Reviewers notice...

All these things come down to giving your reviewers LESS work to do. We like to think that peer review is objective, but it’s not because a human is doing it. All things equal, you’re more likely to get a favorable evaluation from a happy reviewer than an annoyed reviewer

If you found this thread useful, you might also like my @PB_cast podcast episode with @DrStuartBMurray on dealing with manuscript revisions, about getting the most out of twitter, and work-life balance 👉 shows.pippa.io/dsquintana/epi… [22 mins]

https://twitter.com/i/status/1024918450588844032

@PB_cast @DrStuartBMurray Of course, this approach (strictly speaking) isn't realistic if you need to do a lot of statistical inference. The main idea here is to rearrange your work priorities if you're able to.