respond-to-peer-review

name	respond-to-peer-review
category	school
description	Respond to peer review with a complete comment inventory, respectful evidence-based replies, traceable revisions, and explicit disagreements. Use when revising a manuscript, proposal, thesis, or conference submission.

respond-to-peer-review

Resolve the underlying concern, not just the reviewer's wording.

When to use

• Use for formal reviewer, editor, supervisor, committee, or assessed feedback.
• Do not fabricate analyses, citations, approvals, or changes to appear compliant.

Procedure

1. Preserve the submitted version, decision letter, reviews, deadline, formatting rules, and editor instructions.
2. Split every comment into atomic concerns and assign an identifier, location, owner, and status.
3. Classify each as clarification, correction, analysis, evidence, method, scope, presentation, conflict, or request outside the study.
4. Check the manuscript and source evidence before deciding whether the reviewer is correct.
5. Revise the work first, then write a response stating the concern, action, exact location, and result.
6. When disagreeing, acknowledge the concern, provide evidence, state the limitation, and offer a bounded alternative.
7. Flag requests that conflict with ethics, consent, data rights, preregistration, safety, or available evidence.
8. Re-run analyses, tables, figures, references, and cross-references affected by a change.
9. Conduct an independent comment-to-manuscript audit and remove tracked private notes.
10. Submit a versioned response report, clean file, and marked file with a complete response letter.

Worked example

A reviewer requests excluding an inconvenient subgroup. The team verifies that exclusion was not prespecified and would bias the result. The response explains why it is not adopted, adds a transparent sensitivity analysis, and expands the limitation rather than quietly changing the sample.

Done

• A response matrix accounts for every review comment, evidence decision, revision location, owner, and status
• Clean and marked documents plus rerun outputs are checked against the response letter and submission requirements