Doing Economics

4.11 How to Prepare a Successful Revision
Once you have been given a chance to revise your manuscript for and
resubmit it to a given journal, what do you do?
Victories are few and far between in this profession, so the first thing you
should be doing is to make plans to celebrate this little victory as soon as
possible. If you fail to celebrate the wins as they occur, next thing you know
you will be mourning a loss, so make sure you do something nice for
yourself, whatever that means to you—going for a long run, eating at your
favorite restaurant, going out of town for a weekend, getting yourself a new
book, watching a film, and so forth.
The next thing you should do is to read the reviews once, then put them
away for a week. I realize that, given how rare R&R decisions are, and how
much of a difference a publication can make to your career, it is difficult not
to want to start working on an R&R right away. Realistically, however,
waiting one week is unlikely to make a difference to your career. Perhaps
more importantly, setting those reviews aside for a week gives your
subconscious mind a chance to process them, so that when you look at them
again after a week, they do not seem as daunting. This is something I have
noticed time and again when getting R&Rs: upon first reading the reviews,
I tend to get defensive, and I tend to think the revisions will be more
difficult than they objectively turn out to be.
When I read the reviews after a week, however, I immediately start
noting the ways in which I will address the comments. The bottom line is
that reading the reviews once when you get them and setting them aside for
a week seems to be a good way to spark your creativity when it comes to
how you address reviewer comments.
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Once you get back to the reviews, it is time to sketch out a broad plan for
successfully addressing the reviewers’ comments. Read the reviews once to
get a high-level view of what you will need to do, and to write one, maybe
two sentences next to each reviewer comment telling yourself how you plan
on addressing said comment. This stage involves thinking about things like
what you were asked to cut (and whether it makes sense to do so in light of
your paper’s argument), what additional results you are asked to generate
(and whether they should be in the main body of your paper, or whether
they can go in the appendix), whether you are asked to include a theoretical
framework, and any other big change that will require that you reorganize
your paper’s tables or sections.
After that first step, it is a good idea to write down and contrast two
outlines on a single piece of paper: one for the version of the paper that you
submitted and which received an R&R, and one for the planned revised
version. This will allow you to think more clearly about what needs to be
done in going from one to the other. More generally, it helps looking at
whether the planned outline of the revision makes sense to you, and thus to
prospective readers, especially your reviewers and the editor. This is worthy
of note because sometimes a reviewer will ask you to move things around
or cut something out in a way that does not make sense to your core
argument.
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When sketching out the outline of the revised version, I would
recommend following the rough order in which a paper is written, which I
discussed in chapter 2. You should go over each section of your paper, ask
yourself whether it needs to be revised and, if so, what needs to be done to
successfully revise it, and whether this has consequences for the other
sections of the paper. Because each of the sections in the following rough
order tends to feed into the next, you should aim to revise in order the
1. Theoretical Framework
2. Data and Descriptive Statistics
3. Empirical Framework
4. Results and Discussion
5. Summary and Concluding Remarks
6. Introduction, and possibly

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7. Literature Review and Background
You should also aim to prioritize tackling the major comments first—
those comments which reviewers will label as major, which they will tend
to list first in their reviews, or which they will tend to clearly signal are the
big, nonnegotiable things they want you to do before they can recommend
that your manuscript be accepted for publication. It is always tempting to
start with the easy stuff, and to begin by fixing typos and adding the
references the reviewers felt were missing from your manuscript. Avoid that
temptation, if only because a lot of the easy stuff might just fall by the
wayside and no longer be relevant once you have taken care of the big stuff.
For instance, Reviewer 1 might want you to add a reference when you
discuss the literature, but if Reviewer 2 wants you to completely reorient
your motivations to place your paper in an entirely different literature, you
would be wasting your time if you started with the former instead of the
latter.
Once you have a good idea of how you will respond to each comment, it
is time to start preparing two types of document. The first type consists of
your responses to reviewer comments. The second one consists of your
cover letter to the editor.
You should prepare a single document for each reviewer. Each document
should clearly indicate in the title which reviewer it responds to, so a title
like “Responses to Reviewer 1,” or “Responses to Referee 2” at the
beginning works well. Then, because all academics are busy and time is the
scarcest of commodities, it is customary to thank the reviewer for taking her
time to read your paper and comment on it. Even if you did not like their
comments, it is simply common courtesy to thank people when they
dedicate some of their time to reading your work. And even if their
comments were insulting, you can still take the high road and express your
gratitude for what they probably thought were great comments.
After that, it is best to just tackle each reviewer’s comments in the order
in which they appear in their review. What I like to do is to reproduce in my
response to a given reviewer each of that reviewer’s comments in boldface
font, and then write my response under each comment. For example:

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