Therefore, try to address each reviewer’s comments as completely as possible. As is clear from the above, you need it most when dealing with R&R. To engage with peer reviewers, you need precisely that-an engagement. A good R&R peer report is likely to give to a researcher detailed comments, a specific road map, suggestions for the current and future work, and more. What is assured in the case of R&R, is that a researcher needs to engage with every other review comment even more thoroughly than they would do in case of different review categories (except the rejection, of course).Īt the same time, a good R&R peer report is much more beneficial to a scholar’s work on both that article and their overall research, than acceptance in present form or with minor changes. R&R means a kind of ‘second chance’, but at this stage, a researcher cannot be sure at all that at the end, their revised submission will be accepted. In the case of R&R, however, the reviewer’s message is the following: there is much promise in the piece, but it requires a general overhaul before it could be considered for acceptance by the journal-more research, more depth in developing arguments, more attention to counter-arguments, more care in expressing them, etc. While, in both cases, there is a considerable amount of revisions to make, ‘Accept with major revisions’ means that the reviewer recommends to the journal editors to ultimately accept the manuscript after thorough revisions have been made by the author. Note that, generally, R&R does not mean the same as ‘Accept with major revisions’. On the other hand, the piece may simply be too raw.Īnother reason why researchers in all disciplines are increasingly receiving their manuscripts back with the R&R verdict is more straightforward: both (or all, in case of multiple reviewers) peer reviewers may recommend revising and resubmitting the manuscript.
Namely, on the one hand, the piece may be striking in any number of ways: the choice of topic, the originality of the research question and/or principal argument, the novel method and/empirical data therein, etc.
The journal editors may thus be quite divided, both because of the peer review results, and because of their own conclusions that may be quite contradictory. This especially happens when one of the two peer reviewers recommends accepting the article (either with minor or major revisions), while another one recommends to reject it. In this note, I will discuss the particularities of the ‘Revise & Resubmit’ (R&R) peer reviewers’ recommendation, as it is today statistically the most common outcome of scholarly article submissions in most disciplines.Īs both an editorial and peer reviewer for several academic journals, including multi-disciplinary ones, I can fairly say that today, it happens increasingly that journal editors may come to somewhat paradoxical conclusions. Most scholarly journals in any scientific discipline classify article submissions into at least three general categories: The results of the review by peers are recommendations to the journal editors instead of a categorical Yes / No verdict.
If the submission passes this preliminary screening by the journal editors, it then goes to peer reviewers.
How to deal with revise and resubmit to an academic journalĪs you already know, the quality of the manuscript is a decisive criterion for its screening in / out at the pre-peer review-preliminary editorial review, that is-stage.