Point-by-Point Response Examples: Major vs Minor Revisions

Point-by-Point Response Examples for Major vs Minor Revisions

The point-by-point format is standard across nearly all journals. But the register and scope of your responses should vary based on whether you received a major revision or a minor revision decision. Minor revisions require precision and compliance. Major revisions require strategic thinking, substantive argument, and evidence. This guide shows both with worked examples.

How the Format Works

A point-by-point response lists every reviewer comment and your response to it, in order. Each entry has the same structure:

```

[Comment label, e.g., Reviewer 1, Comment 3]

[Paste or paraphrase the reviewer's exact comment]

[Your response]

```

The response itself typically has two parts:

• What you did (the manuscript change, with location)
• Why it addresses the concern (the argument)

Responses that only state what you did, without argument, are weak. Responses that only argue, without showing a change, are also weak. Both parts are necessary.

Minor Revision Examples

Minor revision responses are shorter and more compliance-oriented. The reviewer has accepted the paper's core contribution — they want specific fixes.

Example 1: Ambiguous Statistic

> Reviewer 1, Comment 2: The authors report "marginally significant" results (p = .06) throughout. This language is not recommended by APA guidelines and should be replaced with precise reporting.

> Response: The reviewer is correct. We have removed all instances of "marginally significant" from the manuscript and replaced them with precise p-values and effect sizes throughout (pages 9, 11, and 14). For example, "marginally significant (p = .06)" now reads "p = .06, Cohen's d = 0.32, 95% CI [0.01, 0.63]." We have also added confidence intervals to the three findings previously described in this way, consistent with current reporting standards.

Short, specific, compliant. No argument needed because the reviewer is correct and the fix is straightforward.

Example 2: Missing Citation

> Reviewer 2, Comment 1: The authors fail to cite the foundational work by Ochsner and Gross (2005) on cognitive reappraisal, which is directly relevant to the theoretical framework presented.

> Response: We thank the reviewer for this reference. Ochsner and Gross (2005) is an important foundational paper and we are sorry for the omission. It is now cited in the Introduction (page 3, lines 8-9) where we discuss the origins of cognitive reappraisal research, and in the Discussion (page 17, lines 2-3) where we situate our findings within the broader reappraisal literature. We note that our findings are broadly consistent with the two-component framework they propose.

The last sentence earns its place: it shows you actually read the paper and integrated it rather than just inserting the citation.

Example 3: Table Formatting

> Reviewer 1, Comment 5: Table 3 is difficult to read. Values in the far-right column are cut off. Please revise.

> Response: Table 3 has been reformatted to landscape orientation to accommodate all column values (page 13). We have also added a note clarifying the abbreviations in the column headers, which we realized were undefined.

One sentence, done. Not every response needs to demonstrate intellectual depth.

Major Revision Examples

Major revision responses are substantive. The editor is asking you to demonstrate that the paper's core contribution can survive serious scrutiny.

Example 4: Power and Sample Size

> Reviewer 1, Comment 1: The primary concern with this manuscript is the small sample size. With n=34 per group, the study appears underpowered to detect effects of the size reported. A post-hoc power analysis would help, but ideally the authors would collect additional participants.

> Response: We appreciate this concern and have addressed it thoroughly. First, we have conducted a post-hoc sensitivity analysis to clarify what effects our sample could reliably detect. With n=34 per group, two-tailed α = .05, and 80% power, our study was adequately powered to detect effects of d ≥ 0.70. Our obtained effect sizes were d = 0.72 (primary outcome) and d = 0.68 (secondary outcome), placing them near but above this threshold. Second, we have collected an additional 18 participants per group (total n=52 per group), which now provides 80% power to detect effects of d ≥ 0.57. The results with the full sample are consistent with those previously reported: primary outcome d = 0.69, 95% CI [0.41, 0.97]; secondary outcome d = 0.65, 95% CI [0.37, 0.93]. Updated analyses appear in Section 3.1. We note that the addition of participants did not materially change the findings, which we take as evidence that the original sample was not dramatically underpowered for the effects present in our data.

This response goes beyond the minimum: you collected more data (when possible), ran the sensitivity analysis, showed that results held, and interpreted what this pattern means for the validity concern.

Example 5: Novelty Objection

> Reviewer 2, Comment 2: The paper's main contribution — that emotional context influences memory encoding — has been established many times in the literature. See, for example, Cahill & McGaugh (1998), LaBar & Cabeza (2006), and Kensinger (2009). The authors need to articulate what their paper contributes beyond this established finding.

> Response: We thank Reviewer 2 for these foundational references, all of which we cite in the revised Introduction. We agree that the basic effect of emotional context on memory encoding is well-established. Our claim, however, is more specific and has not, to our knowledge, been previously tested.

> Prior studies establish that emotional valence (positive vs. negative) and arousal affect encoding. Our study tests a different question: whether the social context of emotional experience (shared vs. solitary) modulates encoding, independent of valence and arousal. This distinction is important because it engages a different set of putative mechanisms — social memory systems (Olsson & Ochsner, 2008) rather than amygdala-driven arousal modulation — and has direct implications for understanding social aspects of emotional memory that the existing literature does not address.

> We have substantially revised the Introduction (pages 2-5) to make this distinction clear from the outset, explicitly acknowledging the established valence/arousal literature and positioning our contribution relative to it rather than alongside it. The abstract has also been revised to reflect this framing.

This response performs the key move: it accepts the reviewer's characterization of the prior literature while demonstrating that the paper addresses a distinct question.

Example 6: Alternative Explanation

> Reviewer 1, Comment 4: The authors attribute the group difference in response times to attentional reallocation. However, an equally plausible explanation is that the groups simply differed in baseline arousal, which is known to influence RT independently of attention. The authors should test this alternative.

> Response: The reviewer raises a legitimate concern. We have addressed it in two ways.

> First, we reanalyzed the primary RT comparison using baseline skin conductance level (SCL), collected at the start of each session, as a covariate. The group difference in RT remained significant and of comparable magnitude after controlling for baseline arousal (F(1,83) = 14.7, p < .001, partial η² = 0.15, compared to original η² = 0.17). This analysis is now reported in Section 3.2 (page 13) with a note that the pattern is consistent across the arousal-controlled and unadjusted analyses.

> Second, we have added a paragraph to the Discussion (page 18, lines 5-14) explicitly comparing the attentional reallocation account with the baseline arousal account, noting that (a) our covariate analysis does not support the arousal account, (b) the temporal profile of the RT effect (emerging only in trials 5-8, not 1-4) is inconsistent with a baseline arousal explanation which would predict a general slowing, and (c) the arousal account cannot explain the interaction with stimulus category that we report in Table 4. We have adjusted the language of our interpretation to note that attentional reallocation is the most parsimonious account rather than the only possible one.

Excellent major revision response structure: empirical test, converging evidence from existing data, explicit argument for why the alternative is less supported, and appropriately hedged conclusion language.

Example 7: Conflicting Results in the Literature

> Reviewer 3, Comment 1: The authors cite several findings consistent with their hypothesis but do not engage with a substantial body of contrary evidence, including work by Derakshan et al. (2009), Eysenck et al. (2007), and particularly Casten & Wu (2019), which directly contradicts the authors' conclusions.

> Response: We have read Derakshan et al. (2009), Eysenck et al. (2007), and Casten & Wu (2019) carefully and have substantially revised the Introduction and Discussion to engage with these findings.

> Derakshan et al. (2009) and Eysenck et al. (2007) both found effects in the opposite direction to ours, but in task-switching paradigms. Our task requires sustained attention rather than switching, and as we now note on page 4, lines 6-12, there is reason to believe the direction of the anxiety-attention relationship may differ across these paradigms (see also Bishop, 2009).

> Casten & Wu (2019) is more directly relevant and we acknowledge that it is in tension with our findings. We now discuss this in the Discussion (page 19, lines 4-16), noting three potential sources of divergence: sample characteristics (students vs. community), anxiety measure (trait vs. state), and the dependent measure (accuracy vs. RT). We do not claim to resolve this tension but present our data as additional evidence that requires integration with future work. The tone of our conclusions has been adjusted accordingly to reflect this genuine uncertainty in the literature.

Key: you engaged with the specific papers, articulated why they might differ, and adjusted the confidence of your conclusions to match the actual state of evidence.

Using a Tool to Generate First Drafts

Working through 25-30 point-by-point responses is time-intensive, particularly for major revisions where each response may need to be 150-300 words. [Reviewer2](/#demo) lets you paste any reviewer comment and get a professionally structured first-draft response — useful for moving quickly through straightforward comments so you can focus your effort on the complex ones.

For the full response letter format, see the [response to reviewers template guide](/guides/response-to-reviewers-template). For major revisions that require you to decline specific requests, see [how to respond when reviewers ask for more experiments](/guides/reviewer-asks-more-experiments).