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Authority and Authorship

Requests for Resubmission with Revisions

The editors of your submission may request that you resubmit the manuscript, following suggested revisions. It can be difficult to decide if you should resubmit.

On the one hand, it means that the reviewers and editors valued your work enough to recommend improvements. On the other hand, their comments may be contradictory or miss your point entirely, making it difficult to rewrite your submission The cover letter from the editor may help clarify the key issues or weaknesses in your paper that you need to address before resubmitting it.

When you receive a “resubmit with changes” recommendation, it’s easy to get tunnel vision, to do anything to get published

Resist the tunnel vision: Make no revisions that you feel violate the integrity of your work. You are the final authority about whether and how to revise your paper.
Absorb reviewer comments dispassionately. They may make your paper much stronger.

It's not uncommon for inexperienced writers to object to even minor editorial changes based on the belief that what the writer has submitted for publication has been set in stone by that writer. But as an editor, I'm much closer to the needs and expectations of my publication's readers, and an author should expect that grammatical and other stylistic changes will be made to fit the publication's editorial format.
-- Stan Soocher, journal editor

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