A revise-and-resubmit decision rarely comes with unlimited time or unlimited space to respond. Editors set a resubmission deadline, and many journals and nearly all conference venues cap the length of the response letter itself — a fixed page count, a word limit, or a hard character limit in a submission-portal text field. When three reviewers return a combined 25 comments and you have two weeks and one page to answer them in, treating every comment as equally urgent is not a viable strategy: something has to be triaged. This guide sets out a practical framework for deciding which comments earn full, individual treatment and which can be compressed, batched, or briefly acknowledged — without it reading to the editor as if you dodged anything.
This is a companion to How to Write a Response to Reviewers Letter, which covers the letter’s overall structure, and to Peer Review Response Letters: Major vs. Minor Revisions Across Publisher Templates, which covers how publisher templates differ once the editor has already classified your revision as major or minor. This page is about a different problem: regardless of how the editor classified the decision, individual comments within a single revision are never uniformly important, and when time or word count is the binding constraint, you need a defensible way to decide where your limited effort goes.
Responding to every comment is not the same as addressing every comment equally
Journal and conference guidance is consistent on one point: authors are expected to respond to every reviewer comment, not silently drop the ones they disagree with or find inconvenient. That expectation is about acknowledgment and traceability, not about depth. A comment can be addressed in one sentence — including a sentence that says a change was not made and why — and still satisfy that expectation. The triage decision below is entirely about how much space and how much manuscript revision effort each comment gets, never about whether it gets a response at all.
What actually constrains the response, concretely
Two different constraints tend to get conflated, and the right tactic depends on which one is binding:
- Time. Editors set a resubmission deadline in the decision letter, commonly ranging from a couple of weeks for a minor revision to a few months for a major one. If some requested changes (new experiments, additional analyses, expanded literature review) genuinely cannot be completed inside that window, the constraint is real regardless of how much space you have to write about it.
- Length. Many journals specify a page or word limit for the cover/response letter in their author guidelines, and conference peer review in particular is often stricter still — rebuttals capped at a single page, sometimes enforced by the submission system rejecting anything longer rather than by editorial discretion. Submission portals (ScholarOne, Editorial Manager, OJS) frequently impose their own hard character limits on individual response fields independent of what the journal’s written guidelines say. Where a limit exists, check the actual journal or venue instructions rather than assuming a generic figure — response-letter length conventions vary widely by field and publisher, and CASRAI’s publisher-template guide covers what several major publishers specify.
The two constraints call for different tactics: a time constraint means deciding what gets done to the manuscript at all before the deadline (see How to Respond When a Reviewer Requests an Experiment You Can’t Run for the specific case of an infeasible request under time or resource pressure); a length constraint means deciding how much of the letter each already-completed change gets to describe. Most real revisions face both at once.
A two-axis triage framework: impact and effort
Sort every comment along two axes before drafting a word of the response letter:
- Impact — does this comment bear on the manuscript’s scientific validity, its central claims, its methodological soundness, or the editor’s stated reason for the revise-and-resubmit decision? Or is it a style, presentation, framing, or optional-suggestion point that doesn’t change whether the paper’s conclusions hold?
- Effort — can this be addressed with a quick edit, or does it require new analysis, new data, additional experiments, or a structural rewrite?
Plotting comments against those two axes produces four practical categories:
- High impact, low/moderate effort — do these first and give them full individual treatment. These are almost always the comments the editor is actually watching for in the resubmission. They get the most space in the letter, a clear description of the change made, and a pointer to the exact location in the revised manuscript.
- High impact, high effort — still full treatment, but flag the timeline risk early. If one of these cannot realistically be finished inside the deadline, that is the point to email the editor and ask for an extension or propose an alternative — before the deadline arrives, not in the response letter as an after-the-fact excuse.
- Low impact, low effort — batch these. Typographical corrections, reference formatting, minor wording suggestions, and figure-legend tweaks rarely need individual paragraphs. Group them into a single consolidated line (“We have corrected all instances of X and addressed the minor wording and formatting points raised by Reviewer 2 throughout the manuscript”) and let the tracked-changes copy carry the detail.
- Low impact, high effort — the genuine triage judgment calls. A reviewer’s optional suggestion that would require substantial new work belongs here. These are the candidates for a brief, respectful explanation of why the change was not made within the available time or scope, rather than either silent omission or a disproportionate amount of new work for a point that doesn’t affect the paper’s validity.
Reading the editor’s and reviewers’ own signals for what counts as “major”
Don’t triage purely on your own judgment of scientific importance — the editor has usually already told you, directly or indirectly, which points are load-bearing for the decision:
- The decision letter itself frequently singles out specific reviewer points as conditions for reconsideration (“the manuscript will be considered further pending satisfactory responses to points 2 and 4 from Reviewer 1”). Treat anything named explicitly by the editor as non-negotiable regardless of how much effort it takes.
- Reviewers signal weight through their own language — “this is essential,” “the paper cannot be accepted without addressing this,” versus “the authors may wish to consider” or “as a minor point.” That phrasing is a genuine, usable signal for triage, not just tone.
- A point raised independently by more than one reviewer is a strong signal it reflects a real, structural issue rather than one reviewer’s individual preference — those points move up the impact axis even if each individual reviewer phrased it as a suggestion.
- Comments touching statistical validity, reproducibility, data availability, or research-ethics/reporting compliance are rarely safe to deprioritize even when phrased mildly, since these can affect whether the paper is publishable at all, independent of the specific reviewer’s emphasis.
When reviewers genuinely contradict each other rather than simply differing in emphasis — one wants a section cut, another wants it expanded — that’s a distinct problem from triage under time pressure; see How to Handle Conflicting or Contradictory Reviewer Feedback for how to resolve and document that specific situation.
Compressing the letter without it reading as evasive
When the binding constraint is length rather than time, the goal is to shorten the response, not to shorten the list of comments addressed. A few tactics that hold up under a strict word or page limit:
- Consolidate, don’t omit. Group genuinely similar low-impact points from one or multiple reviewers into a single combined response rather than writing (or dropping) them one by one.
- Front-load the decision-relevant material. If a submission portal enforces a hard character limit on a single field, put the highest-impact responses first — the ones the editor is most likely to check against the manuscript — and keep low-impact acknowledgments to a single clause each.
- Use a two-tier structure where the venue allows it. A short narrative cover letter addressing the editor’s stated conditions in full, paired with a longer point-by-point table (submitted as a supplementary file, where journals accept one) is a standard way to satisfy both a strict cover-letter page limit and the expectation of a complete point-by-point response. Check whether the venue explicitly allows a supplementary response document before relying on this.
- State a deferral plainly rather than burying it. For the low-impact/high-effort quadrant, a single clear sentence (“We agree this would strengthen the analysis; given the revision timeline we were unable to complete it and would be glad to add it during a further round if the editor considers it necessary”) is more defensible under a length limit than either silence or a lengthy justification that eats space better spent on higher-impact points.
The worked example in How to Write a Response to Reviewers Letter and the category library in Peer Review Feedback Examples are useful references for how individual responses are typically phrased once you’ve decided how much space each one gets.
Illustrative example: sorting a mixed comment set
The comments below are a composite illustration, not drawn from a real manuscript or review, used only to show how the triage categories apply in practice.
| Comment (paraphrased) | Impact | Effort | Triage decision |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reviewer 1: sample size calculation is not reported; unclear whether the study was adequately powered | High | Low-moderate | Do first, full response, cite the calculation added to Methods |
| Reviewer 2: independently raises the same concern about statistical power | High (corroborated) | — | Answer both reviewers with one shared, fully detailed response |
| Reviewer 1: recommends an additional six-month follow-up cohort | High if feasible | High (not feasible in the revision window) | Full acknowledgment; propose it as future work and flag the timeline to the editor directly |
| Reviewer 2: several reference formatting inconsistencies | Low | Low | Batch into one consolidated line item |
| Reviewer 3: “the authors may wish to consider” citing two additional related papers | Low | Low | Address briefly; easy to accommodate even under a length limit |
| Reviewer 3: suggests re-running the entire analysis with an alternative statistical model as an optional robustness check | Low-moderate (optional, doesn’t affect stated conclusions) | High | Brief, honest deferral with reasoning, not a full new analysis under the deadline |
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to respond individually to every reviewer comment, even minor ones?
Every comment should get some form of acknowledgment in the response letter, but “respond to” does not require equal depth. Batching several minor, low-impact comments into one consolidated line is standard practice and is not the same as ignoring them.
What if I genuinely can’t finish everything the reviewers asked for before the deadline?
Contact the editor before the deadline, not in the response letter after the fact. Most editors will grant a reasonable extension for a high-impact item that needs more time, or accept a documented plan to complete it in a further round. See this guide for how to establish that a constraint is real and propose a credible alternative.
Is it acceptable to ask an editor for more space if the journal’s response-letter length limit is too tight for the number of comments received?
It’s a reasonable request in genuinely unusual cases (a large number of reviewers, or comments requiring extensive documentation), but treat it as the exception, not the default plan. Most of the time, consolidating low-impact comments and using a supplementary point-by-point table where the venue allows one solves the space problem without needing an exception.
What happens if I deprioritize a comment the editor considers essential?
This is the outcome the triage framework above is specifically designed to prevent: read the decision letter’s own language for which points are conditions of reconsideration, and treat those as non-negotiable regardless of effort required, even if it means requesting more time rather than skipping them.
Should major and minor comments be kept in separate sections of the response letter?
Some publisher templates expect responses grouped by reviewer number rather than by importance — see this comparison of publisher templates for what specific journals expect structurally. Prioritization changes how much space and manuscript effort each comment gets, not necessarily where it sits in the letter’s structure, unless the venue’s own template calls for grouping by priority.
