How do you respond to a major revision from a Scopus journal?

Direct answer: A major revision is a conditional acceptance signal: the editor sees publishable value but wants substantive changes before deciding. It sits between a minor revision (small, quick fixes) and a "reject and resubmit" (rebuild and try again). Unlike an outright reject, a major revision keeps your paper alive at the same journal and gives you a roadmap to acceptance.

Evidence: Elsevier, founded in 1880 and headquartered in Amsterdam, is one of the publishers whose author guidance MAAS mentors check first, and it describes revision decisions as the journal expressing continued interest conditional on the author resolving reviewer concerns (Elsevier, n.d.). Annesley (2011), writing in Clinical Chemistry volume 57, issue 4, pages 551 to 554, notes that first-round acceptance is uncommon and that most eventually published papers pass through at least one substantive revision round, making the response a decisive, not incidental, part of publishing.

Example: A MAAS Publishing Advisory client targeting a Q2 health journal received a decision with 14 reviewer comments and read it as a near-rejection. The decision word was "major revision." After a structured three-week revision with a mentor, the paper was accepted on the second round, the comments had been a checklist, not a verdict.

Direct answer: Read the full letter twice, then wait a day before acting. Separate the editor's framing from the reviewers' lists, and sort every comment into three buckets: changes you agree with, changes you can partly accommodate, and points you will respectfully defend. Map each comment to a concrete task and an owner before you touch the manuscript.

Evidence: Noble (2017), in PLOS Computational Biology volume 13, issue 10, recommends treating the response as a structured project rather than an emotional reaction, and Williams (2004), in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology volume 51, issue 1, pages 79 to 83, advises authors to extract the actionable substance from even harshly worded reviews. Both stress that planning the revision, not rushing to rewrite, is what produces a coherent second-round manuscript.

Example: A Vietnamese PhD candidate coached by MAAS built a simple revision tracker: a table listing each reviewer comment, the planned action, the responsible author, and the manuscript location to be changed. The table turned 22 scattered comments into a finite to-do list, and nothing was missed when the response letter was assembled.

The four decision outcomes and what each one asks of you, look like this:

Direct answer: Build three layers. A short cover letter to the editor thanking them and summarising the headline changes; a half-page bulleted summary of major revisions; and a point-by-point response that copies each comment verbatim and answers it directly beneath, with page and line references. Every comment gets a visible reply, even when the answer is simply "done."

Evidence: Frontiers and Springer Nature author guidance both prescribe the comment-in-bold / response-below format with manuscript locations so reviewers can verify changes quickly (Frontiers, n.d.; Springer Nature, n.d.). Frontiers frames the point-by-point discipline as owed to the reviewer's role: "Peer reviewers are tasked with ensuring that published research meets high standards of clarity, rigor, and credibility" (Frontiers, n.d.), and its current guidance, still live in 2026, breaks the response process itself into 7 numbered steps, from cataloguing every comment to addressing feedback you cannot act on, steps 1 to 7, which is why a reply that skips a point reads as a refusal to engage with that standard, not a shortcut. Both publishers are large enough that this format functions as a de facto industry standard rather than house style: Frontiers, founded in 2007 and based in Lausanne, Switzerland, publishes more than 230 journals, and Springer Nature was formed in a 2015 merger of Springer Science+Business Media with the Nature Publishing Group. Annesley (2011) and Noble (2017) agree that addressing every single point and showing exactly where each change appears, is the strongest predictor of a smooth second round.

Example: A MAAS-coached author structured each entry as: "Reviewer 2, Comment 4: [pasted comment]. Response: We agree and have added a limitations paragraph (p. 15, lines 320–334): '[new text].'" Reviewer 2 returned the second round with one line, "all concerns addressed", because verification took minutes, not a re-read.

Direct answer: You do not have to do everything, but you must respond to everything. Where a request is feasible, do it and show the result. Where it is not, no access to the sample, out of scope, or beyond the study design, explain the constraint honestly, offer the strongest available alternative (a re-analysis, a sensitivity check, or a framing as a stated limitation and future-work direction), and let the editor judge.

Evidence: Williams (2004) advises authors to distinguish requests that strengthen the paper from those that exceed its scope, and to justify partial responses with evidence rather than silence. Elsevier's guidance confirms that a reasoned, transparent explanation of what could not be done is acceptable when supported by a clear rationale (Elsevier, n.d.).

Example: A reviewer asked a MAAS client in a Medical AI study to collect an external validation cohort she could not access within the timeline. Rather than ignore it, she added an internal cross-validation, acknowledged external validation as a limitation, and named it as the next study. The editor accepted the compromise, and the paper progressed to acceptance.

Direct answer: Major revisions usually carry a 30-to-90-day deadline stated in the decision email, against 14 to 30 days for a minor one. Do not sacrifice completeness for speed, a thorough revision beats a fast, thin one. If you need more time, email the handling editor before the deadline; extensions are routinely granted when requested early.

Evidence: Elsevier's author FAQ confirms that revision deadlines appear on the submission-system dashboard and that authors may request extensions through the system or directly from the editor (Elsevier, n.d.). Annesley (2011) reinforces that editors value a complete, well-documented response over a rushed one that leaves comments half-answered.

Example: A MAAS Publishing Advisory client in a joint Vietnam–Australia programme had 60 days, needed to re-run a statistical model, and emailed the editor for two extra weeks. The editor agreed the same day. The short, well-communicated delay had no effect on the final acceptance.

Direct answer: In the second round the same reviewers usually check whether you addressed their points, so consistency between your letter and the manuscript matters most. Many papers are accepted or sent for a quick minor revision here. If the paper is rejected after a major revision, the detailed comments make it far easier to place at a well-matched alternative journal.

Evidence: Noble (2017) emphasises that a transparent, point-by-point letter builds reviewer trust across rounds and reduces back-and-forth. Springer Nature's guidance notes that second-round review focuses on whether prior concerns were resolved, which is why precise location references shorten the cycle (Springer Nature, n.d.).

Example: A Vietnamese researcher coached by MAAS had a Q1 submission rejected after one major revision because of fit, not quality. Using the reviewers' detailed feedback, she reframed the contribution and submitted to a better-matched Q2 journal, where it was accepted within months, the first round had effectively peer-reviewed the paper for free.

Direct answer: The avoidable failures are predictable: skipping comments, arguing instead of evidencing, hiding changes the reviewer cannot find, missing the deadline without asking, and submitting English that obscures the revisions. Each one signals that the author did not take the round seriously and a second rejection is far harder to recover from than the first.

Evidence: Annesley (2011) and Williams (2004) both identify unanswered comments and defensive tone as the most common reasons a revision fails despite sound science. Frontiers (n.d.) warns that responses without clear manuscript locations force reviewers to re-read the paper, which slows and sours the decision. Committee on Publication Ethics (n.d.) guidance, from a body founded in 1997 that now counts more than 13,000 member journals and publishers, treats an evidenced, courteous disagreement with a reviewer as legitimate conduct, while it treats concealing a change or arguing without support as the kind of conduct that damages an author's standing with an editor.

Example: A MAAS mentor reviewing a client's draft response found three comments answered only in the manuscript but not in the letter, and one reply that disagreed without a citation. They added explicit letter entries with page references and supported the disagreement with two sources. The corrected response went back clean, and the reviewers raised no further objections.