I gave a paper at a conference in Sept and was invited to have my paper published in a respected journal. I received the editor comments recently and there are a number of points that I would consider to be, at best, moving away from the argument of the paper, and at worst, just simple mis-readings.

In this case would you stick to your guns and rewrite the paper as you see it, make a few compromises, or go along with the editor's line of thinking regarding the article?

Has anyone any experience of this?

Hey. I have had lots of fun with journal editor/reviewer comments since I am researching quite a controversial topic, but I have always managed to get them published in the end without compromising my argument. I think you need to get a balance- make the changes that you can bear to make even though you don't whole-heartedly agree with them, but I certainly wouldn't weaken the strength of your argment if you genuinely believe in it. If you give a good enough reason why you don't want to make a certain change, then often your defence will be accepted if it is reasonable. One paper I wrote was actually originally rejected by my first choice journal, but my sup said the comments from both one of the reviewers and the editor were unreasonable and unsound, so we wrote back to the editor who admitted we had made very gstrong points, and then the paper was sent to three further reviewers and eventually accepted. So I would concede a little and make some changes, but I certainly wouldn't change your argument to suit that of the editor or weaken your paper by making changes you don't agree with. At the end of the day, if it doesn't get accepted you will be able to send it elsewhere anyway. Good luck, KB

Hi Larry,

Stick to your guns, be flexible with points of clarification but once you start bending to all and sundry you're nothing more than a mouthpiece and we can't have that. ;-)

Congrats on getting the invite to write. A great result. Chuff

You can basically bounce the comments if you feel there is sufficient merit or argument to do so. My first papers first round of reviewer comments were a nightmare...one of the reviewers suggested doing an impractically massive manual analysis, to which we properly shut him down. Either way, give points where you know it wont take a huge amount of work, or agree with the reviewer, and bounce anything that is particularly difficult or leads away from what you want the paper to do. I made a few larger concessions as I tended to agree, and ended up with a much stronger paper for my trouble which sailed through after major revisions, so don't just dismiss everything they say off hand.

Cheers.