Revision and Rebuttal Letter Template

This Latex template for paper revisions provides a clean structure for responding to reviewer comments. It is based on the ideas presented by Leilani Battle at the IEEE Vis 2020 Fail Fest Workshop (failfest.github.io).

Usage

Interleave reviewer comments with

\begin{response}
    point-by-point responses
\end{response}

that describe how you will tackle the raised concerns. Ideally, phrase your responses in a past tense. This way, you might be able to more easily re-use your responses when writing a final response letter.

Additionally, it can be helpful to first summarize each review in your own words and then outline main and recurring concerns, critiques and suggestions.

Example

Have a look at the example PDF or view this project in Overleaf.

You can reference responses by labelling just as any other latex environment:

\begin{response} \label{res:method}
    We reformulated the method and streamlined notation. We replaced \highlightDeletion{this} with \highlightAddition{that}.
\end{response}

\begin{response} \label{res:clarify}
    The discussion section already mentioned strength and weaknesses. For clarity, we used the new notation from \autoref{res:method}.
\end{response}

To keep an overview of the revision progress, prefixing reposes with the current work status can come in handy:

\begin{response}
    \TODO Consistently use term A instead of term B when referring to the thing.
\end{response}

\begin{response}
    \DONE Figure 4 is now explicitly referenced in the main text.
\end{response}

\begin{response}
    \NOGO Additional experiments will not be performed. % this is a non-goal
\end{response}

Sections

The template starts out with four sections, but of course you may use any subset in your response letter:

1. Summaries of Reviewer Concerns and Our Revisions
2. Summaries of Individual Reviews
3. Full Reviews and Point-by-Point Responses
4. A comparison view of the original submission and current revision, created with latexdiff (check the ctan package or Overleaf's docs for more info)
   • The \highlightDeletion with \highlightAddition commands as exemplified above indicate additions and deletions like the latexdiff package