---
name: cscw-author-response
description: Use when a CSCW paper draws Revise and Resubmit or Revise for External Review — triaging reviewer requests, running the weeks-long revision as a project, and writing the point-by-point response letter that the same reviewers will read before they reread anything else.
---

# 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:

```text
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

```text
[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.