Question about revise and resubmit reviewer's comment

[blubb]

One of the reviewers of my paper suggested an extension of my paper but added that "this might be a risky change given the short amount of time". How should I decide whether taking this advice or not? Does anyone have a good phrase how to respond here?

[surefire]

Congrats on the R & R!

 

I haven't been through an R & R myself, but I was at a workshop a little while ago that detailed the process and recommended different strategies for dealing with one (I'm in the social sciences though, so it might be a bit different).

 

With regards to deciding which reviewer recommendations to incorporate, I was advised to divide the feedback into "little tasks" and "big tasks" and to highlight which feedback was voiced by more than one reviewer - my sense was that if more than one reviewer brings something up, you probably should incorporate/address the comments, for sure. That gives you a "have to do" list. From there, you can get a sense of how much time you need to address the "have to" list and then make separate decisions about the rest of the feedback.

 

I've never seen a paper that said, "We wanted to do this, but had no time". "No time" isn't a compelling excuse. The phrase I read more commonly is "This task is beyond the scope of this current research". If you think that the suggested "extension" enriches the purpose/argument of the paper, then it might be worth addressing. If it's just a "neat offshoot" of your project, than you might be better off just mentioning it as a "future direction for research" - just acknowledging it in that capacity might be enough for the reviewer.

 

My advice then, would be to categorize the feedback, come up with a "have to" list and then write up a bullet-point plan for dealing with the feedback (either how you will incorporate it or mention it in the paper, or how you will acknowledge it and give a reason for not incorporating it in the R & R response). Then present the plan to your supervisor, and they can endorse or amend your decisions. Good luck!

Edited July 24, 2014 by surefire

[Munashi]

Consider the following:

 

-How long do you have to resubmit

-How long will the suggested extension take to complete and incorporate?

-Will the suggested extension significantly improve the paper?

 

If you feel like it really would improve the paper, but are concerned about time - ask the editor for a few weeks of extension and explain that you'd like more time to incorporate a really insightful suggestion from Reviewer X, but you need some more time.

 

If you don't feel like the suggestion is worth the effort, or perhaps that it is but it would take a LOT more time than is feasible even with an extension, then incorporate it into the paper as a potential follow-up/future research suggestion and explain in your response letter to the editor/reviewers why you chose not to perform the extension yourself and note that you have added the suggestion into the paper instead.

[blubb]

Thanks for the advice!

 

In my case there was a consensus of the reviewers with some critiques. But the one that was labelled a "risky" change was only mentioned by one reviewer. Its a good idea to rank the tasks by "number of reviewers mentioned it", thanks!!

[TakeruK]

If you don't feel like the suggestion is worth the effort, or perhaps that it is but it would take a LOT more time than is feasible even with an extension, then incorporate it into the paper as a potential follow-up/future research suggestion and explain in your response letter to the editor/reviewers why you chose not to perform the extension yourself and note that you have added the suggestion into the paper instead.

 

An alternative to a task that might take a lot more time (e.g. many more months) is to just explain this in your response letter to the editor/reviewer--you don't always have to mention / suggest offshoots of your own work in your paper. Especially if you want to do this yourself in the future! The advice I got was to avoid speculating about future work because you don't want to tell people how to scoop you and things may come up so that you don't end up doing this future work and someone reading your paper later might try to find this work and not succeed!

 

However, if the extra thing is to test a caveat of your results / methods, and it's something that you think most readers will naturally wonder about when they read your paper, then it is probably worth mentioning the caveat. For example, "Our result makes assumption X which may not hold for all cases Y. Additional study of Z may be required to fully understand...." or something like that. 

 

I agree with the others to get advice from your advisor on whether this change is worth the risk! I think given that only one referee mentioned it and they even recognized that it might be tough to do in a short time, the editor and referee would likely agree with you if you decide it's outside the scope / not worth the time. It sounds like this is a journal with a tight revise/resubmit deadline. Writing that "we wanted to do X but had no time" is definitely something to be avoided in the paper though! In my opinion, if this referee thought this "risky change" is critical to the validity of your paper, they would not have phrased it as a suggestion like this, but instead, worded more strongly! In my experience, referees are generally clear between "suggestions that would be nice" and "things that absolutely must be done for them to want to accept the paper".

 

Also, one final suggestion, if you really want to try to do the suggestion, start on it now and if you don't finish by the revise/resubmit deadline, submit your revisions without the suggestion completed but keep working on it while you wait for the referees to review your revised manuscript. This gives you more time to work on it and if you get another round of revise/resubmit (or maybe now the editor/referees insist on this expansion), then you can include it. If they accept it without the suggested expansion, now you've got a head start on the next paper!

[Munashi]

An alternative to a task that might take a lot more time (e.g. many more months) is to just explain this in your response letter to the editor/reviewer--you don't always have to mention / suggest offshoots of your own work in your paper. Especially if you want to do this yourself in the future! The advice I got was to avoid speculating about future work because you don't want to tell people how to scoop you and things may come up so that you don't end up doing this future work and someone reading your paper later might try to find this work and not succeed!

 

TakeruK is right to mention the risk of scooping if this is an extension you intend to perform yourself in the future!

[juilletmercredi]

The advice I got was to avoid speculating about future work because you don't want to tell people how to scoop you and things may come up so that you don't end up doing this future work and someone reading your paper later might try to find this work and not succeed!

 

I think this is interesting advice because I feel like as a scholar, I talk to others about my future ideas for work all the time, and they talk to me about future ideas for work all the time.

 

I mean, it's one thing to say "Future research should include a longitudinal investigation into the relationship between green reed weaving and chronic fatigue", and quite another to tell people exactly how and when you plan to do it.  I suppose if you put a general idea out in the aether that you run the risk someone will scoop you - but it's somewhat unavoidable; every paper and presentation we do will have that section.  Moreover, the likelihood of someone listening being able to scoop you is small.  Usually we say these things about 1) research that we already have in some stage of progression, that we'll probably get to publication in the next 1-2 years - whereas a potential interloper would have to start from scratch and get together a team, a project, grant funding, etc.  Even if they already had money, they'd still have to collect the data; or 2) research that's just as pie-in-the-sky for us as it is for them...to which I say it doesn't really matter who does it, because that's exactly the function of the future directions section - to give researchers future directions for research.  If a researcher says future work is needed in X and I search and don't find anything in X, I assume that he or no one has done it yet (and thus, this is an area into which I can insert myself).

 

Besides, if the reviewer already suggested it, this is something he could already scoop you on.  Technically the idea was his to begin with anyway.

[TakeruK]

I think there is a bit of a difference between telling someone about future work and putting it in writing in a paper. At conferences or when I meet scholars who visit my department, I freely talk about where I'm going next with my work. The amount of detail is determined by some combination of what my advisor tells me to say, how well I know the person, and my intuition. It's not failsafe, but I agree that being a scholar means sharing ideas, not keeping them all to yourself.

 

However, private communication and publications are different things in my mind. Some journals in my field explicitly forbids discussing any work that is not yet published. It's not just being scooped, I don't want to put something in writing that I may not fulfill (but if the other paper is already submitted then that's a different story). 

 

Also, I agree that we always have a huge advantage on potential scoopers. Unless these other people are on the same stage too with similar data. I agree that if we are discussing a pie-in-the-sky idea or something very obvious, then it makes sense to bring it up in a publication. But if it's literally the next paper you want to write, then I think it's safer to not mention it too directly. Especially as a student, other things can crop up and severely delay a paper!

 

Finally, it's considered bad practice in my field for a referee to use the information he/she learned in a peer review process to give themselves an advantage. There is one well known offender in my field that will use the information they only got by being a reviewer to apply for and get money/telescope time to do something and then email the original authors something like "collaborate with me or I'll publish it before you get to it". People who work in similar fields as this offender are advised to specifically request this person not be their referee. 

 

But if the referee does not act on the idea in their suggestion until the paper is distributed to the wider audience, then it's fair game!