How do you decide when to accept or reject reviewers' suggestions?

Peer review is the refereeing work done by subject matter experts during the screening of research manuscripts. This process analyses quality of research design, rigour of data collection and interpretation, as well as novelty of the research findings. The ultimate goal of peer review is to improve the quality of the paper, so I view it as a great learning opportunity for early career researchers.

Sleep on it! Giving yourself a few days to digest the reviewers' feedback is always helpful. This pause allows for a more pragmatic assessment of the reviewers' perspectives and opens the door to more constructive and positive revisions. When you return for the second reading, you often find your reaction is more moderate, like, "Okay, they have a point here, and I know how to address this comment."

I would give it some time to think and reflect about it, talk to your professor or colleagues about it before you start with your game plan. By allowing yourself some time to reflect you are doing yourself a huge favor because then you can actually respond in a more constructive manner and come up with a more pragmatic approach when needed or a more innovative and bold approach when required. Also, it helps when you organize your feedback that you received from the reviewers by replying to the feedback one by one. While you do this you can also categorize the type of work the feedback holds for you: is it more literature reviewing, another analysis or more methodological questions that you have to work on etc. So: reflect & strategize

Some of the suggestions that I have accepted from peer reviewers in the past were essential to improve a paper. They were: to list all primer sequences used in the study as supplemental data, and to improve the definition of the scale bars in immunohistochemistry figures. These were all legitimate concerns that could be readily addressed "at the desk". However, this is not always the case. Some of the accepted suggestions that could only be addressed "at the bench" pertained to conducting additional experiments. To clarify the function of a protein, one reviewer requested that genetic approaches be added to the experiments using pharmacological inhibitors, as recent data had uncovered unspecific targets for these drugs.

I agree, and in these cases, always err on the side of good intent and appreciation for the editor and the reviewers. Remember, the editor likely saw all reviewer comments and let them stand. Some reviewers might make comments that irritate and show they didn’t read the full paper thoroughly, but assume that means, perhaps, that your writing wasn’t clear.

I have received a comment on language before (typical reviewer 2). It read "This paper is poorly written. English editing is strongly recommended." My supervisor's very polite answer was: "I’m sorry that the manuscript comes across that way. Any specific instances that you can find would be valuable. However, as a native English speaker, without specific instances it is difficult to address this."

I, unfortunately, have to disagree with almost everything that was said in this article. The review system is an unfair system that does not make any sense from every point of view. 2-3 people cannot represent a whole scientific community and there is no insurance about their preparation, competence, and integrity. The only strategy that works in a review system is to please and response/change to how many possible points are raised by the reviewers, even if we don t agree with their suggestions, and aggressively go against the points that cannot be fulfilled for lack of time or resources, even if they are valid points. An article that I would find much more interesting would talk about possible alternatives to the current review system.

Sometimes the reviewer deals with a unidirectional approach or totally unawares about gist of narrative and the level of ego is high in that case the author may get difficulty convincing his scripts prospective properly. If the process is part of approvals then one has to move to another publication house where objective matches

Ensure your paper has been independently QC’d/fact checked before submitting for peer review and then again after the peer review comments have been addressed. This can alleviate a lot of the vague, general comments such as “this is a poorly written paper.”