第二,永远不要跟审稿人争执。跟审稿人起争执是非常不明智的一件事情。审稿人意见如果正确那就不用说了,直接照办就是。如果不正确的话,也大可不必在回复中冷嘲热讽,心平气和的说明白就是了。大家都是青年人,血气方刚,被人拍了当然不爽,被人错拍了就更不爽了。尤其是一些名门正派里的弟子,看到一审结果是major而不是minor本来就已经很不爽了,难得抓住审稿人的尾巴,恨不得拖出来打死。有次审稿,一个审稿人给的意见是增加两篇参考文献(估计也就是审稿人自己的文章啦),结果作者在回复中写到,making a reference is not charity!看到之后我当时就笑喷了,可以想象审稿人得被噎成什么样。正如大家所想的那样,这篇稿子理所当然的被拒了,虽然后来经编辑调解改成了major revision,但毕竟耽误的是作者自己的时间不是?
写答复信的唯一目的是让编辑和审稿人一目了然的知道我们做了哪些修改。因此,所有的格式和写法都要围绕这一目的。一般来说可以把答复信分成三部分,即List of Actions, Responses to Editor, Responses to Reviewers。第一部分List of Actions的作用是简明扼要的列出所有修改的条目,让编辑和审稿人在第一时间对修改量有个概念,同时它还充当着修改目录的作用,详见下面的例子。剩下的两部分是分别对编辑和审稿人所做的答复,格式可以一样,按照“意见”-“argue”(如果有的话)-“修改”这样逐条进行。清楚醒目起见,可以用不同字体分别标出,比如“意见”用italic,“argue”正常字体,“修改”用bold。下面举例说明各部分的写法和格式。
LOA1: The revised manuscript is double spaced. LOA2: A discussion on novelty of this work and a comparison with A and B have been added in page 3. LOA3: A paragraph has been added in page 5 to further explain the algorithm ***. LOA4: Explanations of the legend of Figure 3 have been added in page 7. LOA5: Figure 2 has been enlarged. LOA6: All typos have been removed.
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Responses to Editor
请在修改稿中用双倍行距。
We have double spaced the text throughout the revised manuscript, see LOA1.
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Responses to Reviewers
To Reviewer 1:
意见1:置疑文章的创新性,提出相似的工作已经被A和B做过。
Thank you for pointing this out. A and B’s research groups have done blablablabla. However, the focus of our work is on blablablabla, which is very different from A and B’s work, and this is also the major contribution of our work. We have added the following discussion on this issue in our revised manuscript, see LOA2.