Speaker 1: You have completed your research project and you're now ready to submit. What do you do? If you're doing this for the first time, it is complex and overwhelming. Then when reviewers come back and ask you for a revision, what do you do? How do you respond? I took a clip from my academic writing course. Here I will do an overview of the process from the initial submission phase to the final publication. Then I will talk about what to do when reviewers ask for a revision. We are going to learn about navigating the publication process. I'm going to start off by going through who does what. The first person is the editor-in-chief. So what do they do? They are in charge of editorial policies. They are also in charge of the content to make sure that the content fits the purpose of the journal and to make sure that it fits the audience. Then they are also in charge of the editorial board and the staff members. Next is the editorial board or also known as the advisory board. They are the ambassadors of the journal. Typically they help identify the topic or direction. They are in charge of special editions and they also provide content. Finally, they serve as peer reviewers and they identify peer reviewers. The next person is the managing editor. The managing editor usually commissions articles from someone else. They are the liaison. They liaise with authors, reviewers, and the editorial boards. Finally, they are also the person who coordinates peer review process. The next group, peer reviewers. These are typically experts in the field whether they can be experts in content or experts in the methods. Their role is to determine the validity of the articles and they help the editorial team in making publication decisions. The next group is actually the publisher. These are the main publishers available Elsevier, Sage Journal, Springer, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and more. But the goal of the publisher is to market and promote the article. They help with the submission process. They provide copy editing and proofreading services. They are the one who decide they decide on the layout of the article. They disseminate the article and they are the one who will be mailing out the journal. Now let's go through the submission process. That way you can see who does what and when. This is the process. First, we'll choose a journal and then you'll submit into the submission site. And once it gets through, it becomes the journal's responsibility. The managing editor will check the requirement and make sure that everything goes through and it's the right requirement and then it goes through and gets sent to the editor-in-chief. And here, either themselves or with the editorial board, they will decide on two things. First, reject outright or call or this is called a desk rejection or they send it out for peer review. And then at each level of peer review, it will become either rejection or they will ask you for revision. And finally, once the paper is accepted, the publisher takes over. They are the one who will provide a copy editor, the person who will provide proofreading, the layout. They are the ones who will be sending you the proofs. And once it's done, the publisher will disseminate into paper and also to the website. Briefly, what do you need for submission? You need the main manuscript. You need an abstract, supplemental document, figures, tables, acknowledgement. And then you have other random things such as conflict of interest documents, one from each author. They want you to provide potential reviewers. They want a bunch of checklists. And make sure you check the journal site on the author's guidelines to look at what are the other things that they want you to submit. Right after submission, watch out for your manuscript being unsubmitted by the editorial manager. And the typical reasons are, oh, you left out some components, for example, a checklist or some sort of forms. You maybe exceeded the word limit and so they want you to fix that. Then after, once it gets through, and if you go through the peer review process, how long does it take? It can take one to six months because each round takes about two to three months. And if you have many major revision and it takes three to four rounds, it will take six months to get your paper ready. Good news, you have passed through the first editorial gateway. You went through peer review. They did not reject it. They are requesting for revision. So this is actually a great milestone. And first, let's celebrate this and then we're going to move on. I'm going to start by discussing how do you receive feedback. When you first get your major revision or comments from a reviewer, you will see so many comments. Some are long, some are short, some are positive, some are negative, some are downright mean. So before you start looking at that and get all emotional, emotionally charged, I want you to take on a different attitude and this is going to serve you well. So these are just three rules. When you receive feedback, you must have a positive attitude. Number one, be thankful that you have moved on to the next stage. Because you have completed a project, you have submitted it, it has gone through the gatekeeper of the editor, you went through peer review, they did not reject it, and they just want you to comment, they want you to revise it. Because if they get to this stage, it means that they want your paper to be in there. They want to see how you can fix it. Number two, be appreciative that reviewers have spent their precious time to analyze your paper. Peer review is really hard work. Reviewers need time, they stop the other work, they spend hours, they need to look through your paper properly, they need to craft the response, they need to craft the comments, and their goal is to make your paper better. And finally, it is volunteer work and they are not paid. So you need to appreciate all the time that they have spent to make your paper better. Number three, take responsibility for all of the negative. For example, if they misunderstood your research, it is because you did not write it clearly. Second, if they respond in a mean way, the comments probably reflect unfiltered thoughts of general readers of the journal. So when people give you feedback, they are feedback that are in your face, that are nice, not being mean, and then there is the behind the scene, the behind the scene comment that people talk about your paper without you noticing. So if your reviewer said something that is mean, that is probably the unfiltered thought behind the scene feedback. So I know it can feel terrible, but I want you to think it is better to understand what the unfiltered thoughts are right now instead of getting this negative feedback when your paper is out in the world. Next, plan of action. These are the five steps you want to do. First, read the comment together with your co-authors. Why is that? You want to make sure everybody is on the same page about the interpretation and on how you want to respond. Then number two, list down all of the comments. Do you agree with the comment? You disagree with the comment? Or you disagree, but because it is such a small thing, you are willing to change it. Number three, decide what you will do for each comment. So we are going to talk about that in more detail later. Number four, make sure you have a point by point response, a cover letter, make sure you separate the comment and response, think about whether you want to use it as a table versus paragraph. And number five, track changes in the original document. And that means include page numbers and anything to make life easier for your reviewer. So I'm going to go into detail about what you're going to do with the comments. So typically there are five things you can do. Number one, clarify. So if the reviewer misunderstood something, clarify why you meant a certain way, you actually meant something, and you rewrite the parts that cause the confusion. Number two, add. So sometimes reviewers are going to ask you, oh, you need more information for this. And you could add things like references, information, add context. They may also ask you to add additional analysis and results. Here is a really key point. You want to decide whether is it worth doing. Are you able to do it? If you can, you do it. If you can't, then you have to explain why not. Number three, remove. Sometimes reviewers are going to talk to you about, oh, this topic is not relevant to the main message. Remove this. Or maybe the interpretation, they want you to remove interpretations that do not really support the message. So if you can, usually I tend to comply, unless it is really important for the context. Number four, fix. Here, they may not tell you to fix it, but they are going to say, oh, this part is unclear. Then you want to restructure it and reframe it. And number five, acknowledge. So this is where you have something that they want you to do, something they want you to fix, but you can't do it or you are not willing to do it. So you want to acknowledge it and you want to include that as a limitation. Next, point by point response. We're going to go through these five points. Number one, you want to include a cover letter. I'm going to show you a snippet later. You can separate the comment and response. Number three, assume that readers, reviewers can see your response out in public. This is especially seen in open peer review process. So there are papers like Open BMJ. There are supplemental files where you can see the actual reviewer comments and also reviewer response in the published journal. So make sure you're always polite and make sure your responses are thoughtful. Number four, do not ignore comments. Don't just ignore it because they will go through three months and going to ask you to fix it again. You're just wasting time, adding time to your publication process. Number five, if you can't do a particular analysis or experiment or do not have the resources to do it, do not be vague about it. Be upfront and say and tell them we can't do this because of that. Because what's the worst thing that can happen? If this analysis is so crucial, two things can happen. One, they reject it now or they go through another cycle. They are trying to insist that you do this and you get rejected three months later. You might as well get it done now and start moving on to the next journal. So this is what I mean by a cover letter for a reviewer response. A simple framework, thank you for taking the time to review our manuscript and for providing thoughtful feedback. We found the comments constructive and we have incorporated many of the suggestions into our manuscript. Please see the point-by-point response below. Thank you sincerely, your names. Then how do you do the point-by-point response? Typically, separate the comment and the response and make it easy for the reviewer. Here, for example, the section about US insurance model is not relevant to this manuscript. I suggest removing it and so you can have two responses. One is maybe you agree we have removed that sentence as suggested or maybe this part is really important for your study data and you want to give more context. So that means that you were not clear enough in your original manuscript, so you want to explain further. You can say given that the data comes from the Medicare data, the US insurance model determines the practice pattern. We have revised the section to further contextualize the relevance of the insurance model and how the data is collected. Please see page 6, line 26. So here you are providing context and you're also fixing the original manuscript so that it makes it clearer. Finally, you give the page number and the line number. A reviewer can find where you have made the revision. Another way of showing point-by-point response is using a table. You can put a comment on the left side and response on the right side. So this is a nice neat way to do it as well. There you go. This is how you respond to reviewers. And one final point before we go. You are at the final stretch of the publication process. At this stage, when you get a major revision, it is usually when your editor and the reviewers really want your paper in their journal. So make sure you do this in a positive attitude and give your response in a polite and thoughtful manner. The video I showed you earlier was about what to do with major revisions. But if your paper gets rejected, what are the next steps? Should you give up? This video here is going to guide you what your next steps are.