17

I have received a minor revision after a major revision for a paper.

I discovered that I made a mistake in the calculations. Fixing it will result in changing a lot of the results, but the final result will not change much.

So should I mention these changes to the reviewers (they are noticable) or should I just correct the mistake without mentioning it to the reviewers in the response?

Improve this question
0

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
66

You should always mention this! If you don't, then the entire manuscript becomes suspect. The reviewer has no way of telling what else you changed, and would be forced to recheck the entire manuscript. It's very time-consuming (and cruel of the authors).

Tell the reviewers exactly where your revisions are and why you're making them. You're already using their time, try to make their work as simple as possible.

Improve this answer
5
  • 19
    Hijacking this great answer to add that something you can do to be kind to the referee (at least, in the journals in physics I am familiar with) is to make your revisions to the text in color, so the reviewer can quickly see what has changed. (The final page proofs will remove this color).
    – Andrew
    Commented Apr 12, 2022 at 21:45
  • 5
    We usually also include a "changelog", addressing each of the referee's comments: Referee comment 1 We added a new paragraph in section 1.2.3 to address this. Referee comment 2 This is not valid because .... Referee comment 3 We fixed this error, affecting equations 1, 2, and 3 Other changes Apart from the comments by the referee we also fixed errors in equations 7, 8, and 9. They do not affect the final result
    – Simon
    Commented Apr 13, 2022 at 9:52
  • Excuse the formatting above, apparently a lot of markdown is not supported in comments?
    – Simon
    Commented Apr 13, 2022 at 9:56
  • @Simon Yeah, each comment is forced to display as a single paragraph, so only inline formatting is supported; no line breaks, paragraphs, bullet lists, etc.
    – TooTea
    Commented Apr 13, 2022 at 13:28
  • 2
    @Andrew I sometimes use latexdiff, so the reviewers get a final document and the exact list of what was changed.
    – Davidmh
    Commented Apr 14, 2022 at 9:37
9

Been there, done that. You need to redo the calculations and rewrite the paper. Make sure you communicate your needs to the handling editor. They will decide if it needs to go back to the reviewers.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .