cscw-author-response

name	cscw-author-response
description	Use when a CSCW paper draws Revise and Resubmit or Revise for External Review — triaging reviewer requests, running the weeks-long revision as a project, and writing the point-by-point response letter that the same reviewers will read before they reread anything else.

CSCW Author Response

There is no rebuttal box at CSCW. The venue's response instrument is the revision plus response letter of a journal: you get weeks or months, you may change anything in the manuscript, and the people reading the result are the reviewers who wrote the critiques. That combination — real time, real changes, remembered context — makes the response letter the highest-leverage document of the whole pipeline.

Triage: sort requests before touching the manuscript

Extract every distinct request from every review into a ledger, then classify:

Class	Definition	Response posture
Do	Legitimate, feasible in the window	Do it fully; show where
Do differently	Legitimate concern, wrong prescription	Fix the underlying concern; explain the substitution explicitly
Decline	Would harm the paper or exceed the study's license	Decline once, with reasons — never silently
Cannot	Requires data/access that no longer exists	Say so plainly; offer the honest partial (new limitation text, added analysis of existing data)

Two CSCW-specific triage realities:

• Cross-tradition requests are common. A quantitative reviewer may ask an interpretive study for reliability statistics; a qualitative reviewer may ask a trace study for member voice. Handle these as "do differently": meet the underlying worry (analytic credibility; human grounding) within your tradition's own rigor, and teach the standard you are meeting in one respectful sentence.
• New-data requests need early decisions. More interviews or another deployment wave may be impossible mid-revision. Decide in week one whether to collect, substitute, or descope a claim — this decision gates everything else.

Running the revision as a project

• Assign each ledger row an owner and a due date inside the window stated in the decision letter (confirm the date; under rolling it is set per paper).
• Sequence: analysis-changing work first, prose second, response letter third — a letter written before the changes stabilize will misdescribe them.
• Freeze a diffable copy of the round-one manuscript; you will need honest before/after references, and reviewers may check.

The response letter

Structure that survives a skeptical same-reviewer read:

Dear Editor and Reviewers,

Summary of changes (½ page max):
  the 3-5 revisions that changed the paper's substance, plainly stated.

Per-reviewer, per-point:
  R1.1  [quote or faithfully paraphrase the request]
        Response: what we did / why we did something else / why we declined.
        Location: §4.2, ¶3; Appendix C, Table 7.
  R1.2  ...
  R2.1  ...

Changes not requested by any reviewer:
  list them — silent edits discovered later cost trust.

Letter discipline:

• Answer the request that was made, then stop. Padding a response with re-argued contributions signals evasion to someone who has read it all before.
• Point to locations, not to effort. "We substantially revised Section 4" is unverifiable; "§4.2 now reports the attrition counts (new Table 3)" is.
• Keep the tone collegial and unwounded. The reviewer rereads your paper with this letter's tone in their ear.
• Preserve anonymity — the revision round is still anonymized: no names in the letter, no identifying artifacts in newly added materials.
• Concede real hits explicitly. "The reviewer is right that our round-one framing overclaimed; we have rescoped the claim to the six communities studied" converts a weakness into demonstrated judgment.

Revise-for-External-Review responses

The internal-round variant is smaller but the same shape: a short letter, the specific repairs, done fast. Its purpose is to make the paper worth reviewers' time — fix exactly what the screeners flagged and resist the urge to renovate.

Exit check before resubmission

[Ledger]    every request answered exactly once (no orphans, no repeats)? y/n
[Locations] every claimed change verified at its cited section/page? y/n
[Diff]      unrequested changes listed? y/n
[Tone]      letter read aloud by a co-author not involved in drafting it? y/n
[Anonymity] new text, tables, and supplements swept? y/n
[Deadline]  resubmission date and format confirmed against the decision letter? y/n

In the last verified cycle roughly four of five R&R papers that resubmitted were accepted (152 of 196; checked 2026-07-08) — the loop rewards teams that treat it as the venue's main event rather than an appeal.