What we say and what we mean in our responses to reviewers.
Diplomacy is becoming a bit of a lost art on the world stage at the moment, but it’s one that scientists still routinely practice. Politely replying to a paper’s reviewers, often through gritted teeth and with white knuckles, tends to produce some phrases that would grace any ambassador’s speech. TIRsamples a few.
| What authors write: | What authors mean: |
| We were surprised at the reviewer’s reaction to these data… | We believe that this reviewer is a very unhappy person right now and taking it out on us. |
| We would prefer not to implement… | We’re not going to do it. Not unless you force us. |
| We are very grateful to the reviewer… | We are not grateful at all. |
| We would like to thank the reviewer for bringing this to our attention. | That was the interpretation we were trying to sweep under the carpet. |
| We feel that this would be outside the scope of the present work. | The reviewer is trying to make us produce a whole second paper. |
| We had accidentally overlooked this publication… | Oh man, you totally saved us from making fools of ourselves. |
| We have added the requested citations. | We have cited the reviewer’s own papers, which we disagree with. |
| We have incorporated the model suggested by the reviewer. | We have now included the reviewer’s pet theory, but we still don’t believe it. |
| We respectfully disagree with the reviewer’s assessment. | The reviewer is our main competitor. |
| We were pleased that two of the three reviewers were enthusiastic about the paper. | We're just going to ignore the hostile reviewer. |
| This point was actually addressed in the earlier paragraph. | The reviewer has clearly not read the paper carefully enough. |
| Reviewer 1 raised a large number of issues, but these were mostly small corrections. | Reviewer 1 is a postdoc. |
| We have implemented the small number of suggestions made by the reviewer. | We love this reviewer! Why can’t all reviewers be like this? |
| As requested, we have moved these data to the supplementals | We really don’t care any more. Just please, please accept it for publication. |
| We feel it would be premature to… | That’s the start of our next paper. |
| It had not escaped our notice that… | It had totally escaped our notice that… |
| Due to space constraints… | We can’t be bothered to include this. |
| We were delighted at the reviewers’ assessments. | This was the best pampering we've ever had. |
| The reviewer has already made this point once before. | This review was written by multiple people in one group who took turns trashing it. |
| We feel that inclusion of the data from this control would be superfluous. | That experiment was done by a rotation student and it looks terrible. |
| As was stated by Shaw et al, 1923… | You think you can out-reference us? Brace yourself! |
| This feedback was not terribly constructive. | Seriously, who let this animal off its leash? They’re psychotic. |
| We feel that speculating on this point would be unproductive. | We’re not going to tell you what experiments we’re doing next. |
| We have removed our speculation on this point. | Fine, be boring and unimaginative. We don’t care, we’ve got ideas to burn. |
| Repeating the experiments in another species would be beyond the scope of the present work | The reviewer has only skimmed the manuscript and this was the best they could come up with. |
| We have, as requested, re-arranged and cropped all the images and put scale bars on every one. | Why are microscopists so unbelievably fussy? |
| Upon consideration, we decided to remove this panel from the figure. | We realised that we’ve lost the raw data so we can’t rebut your point. |
| We do not think that adding more data would develop this point. | The first author is no longer in the group and nobody else knows how to do the assay. |
| Implementing this request would be far from trivial. | Our collaborator is refusing to do it. Do you want to try and persuade them? We can’t. |
| The reviewer may be underestimating the difficulty of this request. | If they actually understood the technique, they would realise that what they are asking for is literally impossible. |
| We would like to thank the reviewer for their constructive and balanced critique. | Hallelujah! For once, somebody actually knows how to do this job properly. |
| We think this criticism was rather unfair. | You made the first author cry. |
Acknowledgements: Graham Warren and Oliver Hoeller, for suggestions and feedback.
Originally published (with more profane language) in Total Internal Reflection - here.
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