brycewang-stanford CSCW Author Response
There is no rebuttal box at CSCW. The venue's response instrument is the revision plus response letter of a journal: you get weeks or months, you may change anything in the manuscript, and the people reading the result are the reviewers who wrote the critiques. That combination — real time, real changes, remembered context — makes the response letter the highest-leverage document of the whole pipeline.
Triage: sort requests before touching the manuscript
Extract every distinct request from every review into a ledger, then classify:
| Class | Definition | Response posture |
|---|---|---|
| Do | Legitimate, feasible in the window | Do it fully; show where |
| Do differently | Legitimate concern, wrong prescription | Fix the underlying concern; explain the substitution explicitly |
| Decline | Would harm the paper or exceed the study's license | Decline once, with reasons — never silently |
| Cannot | Requires data/access that no longer exists | Say so plainly; offer the honest partial (new limitation text, added analysis of existing data) |
Two CSCW-specific triage realities:
- Cross-tradition requests are common. A quantitative reviewer may ask an interpretive study for reliability statistics; a qualitative reviewer may ask a trace study for member voice. Handle these as "do differently": meet the underlying worry (analytic credibility; human grounding) within your tradition's own rigor, and teach the standard you are meeting in one respectful sentence.
- New-data requests need early decisions. More interviews or another deployment wave may be impossible mid-revision. Decide in week one whether to collect, substitute, or descope a claim — this decision gates everything else.
Running the revision as a project
- Assign each ledger row an owner and a due date inside the window stated in the decision letter (confirm the date; under rolling it is set per paper).
- Sequence: analysis-changing work first, prose second, response letter third — a letter written before the changes stabilize will misdescribe them.
- Freeze a diffable copy of the round-one manuscript; you will need honest before/after references, and reviewers may check.
The response letter
Structure that survives a skeptical same-reviewer read:
Dear Editor and Reviewers,
Summary of changes (½ page max):
the 3-5 revisions that changed the paper's substance, plainly stated.
Per-reviewer, per-point:
R1.1 [quote or faithfully paraphrase the request]
Response: what we did / why we did something else / why we declined.
Location: §4.2, ¶3; Appendix C, Table 7.
R1.2 ...
R2.1 ...
Changes not requested by any reviewer:
list them — silent edits discovered later cost trust.
Letter discipline:
- Answer the request that was made, then stop. Padding a response with re-argued contributions signals evasion to someone who has read it all before.
- Point to locations, not to effort. "We substantially revised Section 4" is unverifiable; "§4.2 now reports the attrition counts (new Table 3)" is.
- Keep the tone collegial and unwounded. The reviewer rereads your paper with this letter's tone in their ear.
- Preserve anonymity — the revision round is still anonymized: no names in the letter, no identifying artifacts in newly added materials.
- Concede real hits explicitly. "The reviewer is right that our round-one framing overclaimed; we have rescoped the claim to the six communities studied" converts a weakness into demonstrated judgment.
Revise-for-External-Review responses
The internal-round variant is smaller but the same shape: a short letter, the specific repairs, done fast. Its purpose is to make the paper worth reviewers' time — fix exactly what the screeners flagged and resist the urge to renovate.
Exit check before resubmission
[Ledger] every request answered exactly once (no orphans, no repeats)? y/n
[Locations] every claimed change verified at its cited section/page? y/n
[Diff] unrequested changes listed? y/n
[Tone] letter read aloud by a co-author not involved in drafting it? y/n
[Anonymity] new text, tables, and supplements swept? y/n
[Deadline] resubmission date and format confirmed against the decision letter? y/n
In the last verified cycle roughly four of five R&R papers that resubmitted were accepted (152 of 196; checked 2026-07-08) — the loop rewards teams that treat it as the venue's main event rather than an appeal.