Most guidance on responding to reviewers assumes a single author sitting down to write the letter. On a multi-author paper, the harder problem often comes before any writing starts: deciding who on the author team handles which comments. A five-author paper with a statistician, two experimentalists, a clinical lead, and a corresponding author who wrote the first draft is not going to have one person credibly answer every comment alone — nor should one person try to. This guide covers how to divide response-to-reviewers work across co-authors: who should coordinate the split, the practical ways to allocate comments, how to keep the letter reading in one voice despite multiple drafters, and what to do when co-authors themselves disagree about how to respond.
This is a different problem from the ones covered in CASRAI’s other response-to-reviewers content. How to Write a Response to Reviewers Letter covers the structure and tone of the letter itself, assuming someone has already drafted each answer. How to Handle Conflicting or Contradictory Reviewer Feedback covers what to do when two reviewers contradict each other. Prioritizing Major vs. Minor Reviewer Comments covers triaging comments under a length or time limit. Managing Manuscript Versions Across Co-Authors covers keeping one authoritative draft once edits start coming back in. None of those addresses the upstream question this guide does: with a fixed list of reviewer comments and several qualified co-authors, who answers what, and how does the team make sure the final letter reads as one coherent response rather than a patchwork.
Why this needs an explicit plan, not an assumption
On a single-author or two-author paper, division of labor is usually obvious or unnecessary — whoever is available responds. That breaks down as author count and disciplinary range grow. A reviewer comment about statistical power belongs with whoever ran the analysis, not with the corresponding author by default; a comment about clinical relevance belongs with the clinical co-author; a comment about a competing method in the literature may belong with whoever wrote that section of the discussion. Assigning all of it to the corresponding author because they are the point of contact with the journal conflates two different jobs: communicating with the editor (an ICMJE-defined responsibility) and having the technical standing to answer a specific scientific objection. The first is a fixed role; the second should track expertise, comment by comment.
Skipping an explicit division has a real cost. Comments that don’t obviously belong to anyone tend to get answered by whoever is fastest to reply rather than whoever is best placed to, which is how weak or generic responses to a substantive methodological objection end up in a resubmitted letter — exactly the kind of response an editor or reviewer notices in a second round.
Who coordinates the split
In practice this coordination job falls to the corresponding author by default, for the same reason they end up owning manuscript version control: they are already the fixed point of contact with the journal and already have to produce one final, submittable letter. Nothing in ICMJE’s authorship criteria or in the CRediT taxonomy assigns “coordinates the response letter” as a formal duty, but someone has to receive the decision letter, read every comment once, and route each one before drafting starts. On teams with a distinct senior/last author who is not the corresponding author, that person often makes the scientific call on close judgment comments, while the corresponding author still runs the logistics and consolidates the final document. Either way, the team benefits from deciding this explicitly at the start of the revision, rather than each co-author independently guessing which comments are theirs.
Ways to divide the comments
There is no single correct allocation method; the right one depends on how the reviewer comments are distributed and how the author team’s expertise maps onto the paper’s sections. In practice, most teams use some combination of the following.
By subject-matter expertise or CRediT role
The most common approach: route each comment to the co-author whose actual contribution to the work — not their author-list position — makes them best placed to answer it. If the paper carries a CRediT contributor statement, it is a ready-made map for this: the co-author credited with Formal analysis is the right person for a statistics comment, the one credited with Investigation or Methodology for a comment about how an experiment was run, and so on. This is also the most defensible allocation if a reviewer or editor later asks who is responsible for a specific claim in the response, since it tracks a documented contribution rather than an informal assignment made over email.
By manuscript section
Where comments cluster by section — several comments on Methods, several on Discussion — some teams assign by section instead of by individual comment, matching each block to whichever co-author owns that part of the draft. This works well when comments are dense in one section and sparse elsewhere, but it can leave a single comment stranded in a section nobody “owns” (a Discussion comment that is really a statistics question); when that happens, route the individual comment to the relevant expert rather than forcing it to the section’s nominal owner.
By reviewer
Less common, but sometimes practical when one reviewer’s comments are narrowly focused on a single aspect of the work (e.g., a statistical reviewer added specifically for that expertise) — assign that reviewer’s entire set to the corresponding subject expert. This tends to work only when the reviewer’s comments genuinely stay in one lane; check before committing to it, since many reviewers comment across the whole manuscript.
A hybrid triage pass first
Before assigning anything, it is worth running the full comment list through the same major/minor triage covered in CASRAI’s guide on prioritizing major vs. minor reviewer comments. Major, substantive comments justify individual assignment to the most qualified co-author and real drafting time; minor or editorial comments (typos, formatting, a citation update) can often be batched and handled by whoever is assembling the final letter, without needing to route each one individually. Triaging first keeps the assignment step focused on the comments that actually need a specific expert.
A practical workflow
- Corresponding author reads the full decision letter once and produces a single numbered list of every comment from every reviewer, in one shared document — not left split across separate reviewer PDFs, which is how comments get missed.
- Assign each comment to a named co-author using whichever method above fits the paper, and set a shared deadline for first-draft answers that leaves time for review before the journal’s resubmission deadline.
- Co-authors draft their assigned answers independently, each stating what changed in the manuscript (with a location reference) and why, following the point-by-point structure covered in how to write a response to reviewers letter.
- One person consolidates — almost always the corresponding author — merging every drafted answer into a single document and editing for consistent tone, terminology, and formatting, so the letter does not read as several different people’s voices stitched together.
- Full author team reviews the consolidated letter before submission, not just their own section, since a change one co-author made to satisfy a comment can have implications for a section another co-author owns.
Keeping one voice across multiple drafters
Editors and reviewers read the response letter as coming from the author team as a whole, not from whichever individual happened to type a given paragraph, so stylistic consistency matters more than it might seem. A few practical habits keep a multi-drafter letter from reading as fragmented:
- Agree on a shared template for each answer before drafting starts (e.g., reviewer comment in italics or a shaded block, response below it, changed text quoted or page-referenced) so every co-author’s section has the same shape.
- Have the consolidating author normalize person and tense — some co-authors will default to “we,” others to passive constructions describing what was “done” — into one consistent choice across the whole letter.
- Keep a single running document with real-time edits rather than emailing draft answers back and forth as separate files; this is the same version-control discipline covered in CASRAI’s guide on managing manuscript versions across co-authors, applied to the response letter instead of the manuscript itself.
- Do a final read-through against the numbered comment list to confirm nothing was dropped when individual answers were merged — the most common consolidation error is a comment quietly disappearing between the shared list and the final document.
When co-authors disagree with each other, not just with a reviewer
Division of labor surfaces a distinct problem from the one covered in CASRAI’s guide to conflicting reviewer feedback: that guide is about two reviewers wanting opposite things. This is about two co-authors disagreeing on how to answer a single reviewer, or disagreeing with a change another co-author already made to satisfy a comment. That disagreement needs resolving before the letter is finalized, not left ambiguous in the merged document. A workable default: the co-author with direct expertise over the disputed point (or the CRediT-credited contributor for that aspect of the work) has the stronger claim on the scientific substance, while the corresponding author or senior/last author has the tie-breaking say when expertise doesn’t clearly settle it and the team needs to move forward on a deadline. Whatever the resolution, it is worth a brief note in the team’s own records (not the letter itself) of what was decided and why, particularly if the same disagreement could resurface in a later revision round.
Setting this up before the paper is even submitted
Teams that agree on authorship contributions early avoid most of this friction later. A co-author agreement drafted before submission, or a CRediT contributor statement maintained accurately as the paper develops, gives the team a documented basis for assigning response-letter work by expertise rather than negotiating it fresh under a revision deadline. It is also worth deciding, at the same time, who the fallback consolidator is if the corresponding author is unavailable during the response window — a real risk given that response-letter turnarounds are often measured in weeks, not months.
Frequently asked questions
Should every co-author see every reviewer comment, or only the ones assigned to them?
Every co-author should see the full comment list and the full decision letter, even if they are only drafting answers to a subset. Authorship carries collective accountability for the final response under ICMJE’s authorship criteria, so no co-author should be signing off on a letter containing sections they never read.
What if no co-author is clearly the right person for a comment?
This happens most often with a comment that spans two areas of expertise (e.g., a statistical method applied to a specific clinical measure). Assign it jointly to both relevant co-authors rather than defaulting it to the corresponding author by elimination; a short conversation between the two is usually faster than one person guessing at unfamiliar material.
Does the division of labor need to be disclosed to the journal?
No. Journals expect one consolidated response letter from the author team and do not require a breakdown of who answered which comment. Internal assignment is a team-management question, not a disclosure obligation — unless a specific journal or funder policy states otherwise, which is uncommon for this particular document.
How is this different from just splitting up manuscript revisions the same way authors split up writing the original paper?
The mechanics are similar, but the stakes are higher and the timeline shorter: reviewers are checking whether their specific concerns were actually addressed, so misassigning a technical comment to someone without the standing to answer it convincingly is more likely to surface as a weak response and trigger another review round, compared with an uneven section of a first draft that a co-author can simply strengthen later.
