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What are the best practices for writing rebuttal letters during peer review? (63)

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Starting 20 pts 0 followers
St. Aloysius College · Posted
Environmental Science Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Context

I am preparing to submit my first research paper to a Q1 journal (IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks). This will be my first submission and I am unsure about a few things.

Questions:

  1. Is it mandatory to submit the code and dataset along with the paper, or is that only required upon acceptance?
  2. My results show a 2.3% improvement over the SOTA baseline. Is that considered significant enough?
  3. How long does the review process typically take for IEEE Transactions journals?

I have read the author guidelines but they are somewhat ambiguous on point 1. Would appreciate guidance from anyone who has published in similar venues.

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22 Replies

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Xena D'Souza Starting 25 pts · Accepted answer

Could you clarify what you mean by results-blind review? I have heard of it but never understood how it works in practice. Wouldn't reviewers need to see results to evaluate whether the methodology is sound?

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Replying to Xena D'Souza
Rohan Desai Distinguished 950 pts · Accepted answer

Seconding the recommendation for Zotero. Game changer for managing references across multiple projects.

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Replying to Xena D'Souza
Uday Bose Starting 5 pts · Accepted answer

This is really helpful context. One more question: for the ethics committee approval, does the institution where the data is collected or the institution where the analysis is performed need to be the primary ethics approver?

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Harini Balakrishnan Active 215 pts · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed to hear. One clarifying question: you mentioned FedProx handles non-IID data better.does that mean I should switch to FedProx by default, or only if I observe poor convergence with FedAvg first?

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Replying to Harini Balakrishnan
Vikram Bhatia Active 420 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you! The reference to MuRIL is particularly useful.I had not considered it as an alternative to XLM-R for Indic languages.

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Neha Agarwal Growing 90 pts · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

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Replying to Neha Agarwal
Disha Malhotra Starting 8 pts · Accepted answer

Seconding the recommendation for Zotero. Game changer for managing references across multiple projects.

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Replying to Neha Agarwal
Karthik Rajan Growing 180 pts · Accepted answer

This is really helpful context. One more question: for the ethics committee approval, does the institution where the data is collected or the institution where the analysis is performed need to be the primary ethics approver?

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Suresh Iyer · Accepted answer

Open access is the right direction but the APCs are prohibitively expensive for many Indian researchers without institutional funding.

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Sanjay Kumar Growing 145 pts · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

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Prakash Iyer Distinguished 640 pts · Accepted answer

I have a slightly different take from my experience in industry research. The reproducibility crisis is real but unevenly distributed. Fields with strong engineering culture (computational biology, ML with benchmarks) have actually improved significantly in the last 5 years. The bigger problem is in fields where data sharing is structurally difficult.clinical medicine, behavioral economics.

The ML community's move toward open code and reproducibility checklists has been genuinely effective.

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Ravi Patel Starting 25 pts · Accepted answer

For longitudinal data with missing values, mixed-effects models handle this more gracefully than imputation in most cases.

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Tara Singh Starting 5 pts · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

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Arjun Venkatesan Growing 195 pts · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

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Nandita Ghosh Distinguished 720 pts · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed to hear. One clarifying question: you mentioned FedProx handles non-IID data better.does that mean I should switch to FedProx by default, or only if I observe poor convergence with FedAvg first?

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Replying to Nandita Ghosh
Amit Joshi Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

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Replying to Nandita Ghosh
Divya Krishnan Growing 85 pts · Accepted answer

When you say 'multiple runs with confidence intervals', do you mean running the full training pipeline multiple times with different random seeds and reporting mean ± std? Or something more statistically rigorous?

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Wajid Khan Growing 110 pts · Accepted answer

I have successfully received PMRF (lateral entry, second year). Happy to share what worked in my proposal.

On the research proposal:

  • 60–70% technical approach, 30% context and impact
  • Preliminary results absolutely help. Coursework projects are fine if genuinely relevant
  • The societal impact section should be substantive.PMRF is a national initiative; reviewers want to see why this matters

On citations: Yes, cite your MTech thesis. Framing your PhD as an extension of prior work you did shows continuity of thought.

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Kiran Yadav Growing 130 pts · Accepted answer

The Fulbright SoP is very different from a typical PhD SoP. It needs to focus on cultural exchange and diplomacy, not just research.

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Karthik Rajan Growing 180 pts · Accepted answer

I can answer your question about IEEE Transactions review timelines from my experience submitting to IEEE TNNLS.

For Q1 IEEE journals, expect:

  • Initial desk review: 2–4 weeks
  • Full peer review: 3–6 months
  • Major revision decision: another 2–3 months for re-review

As for code and data, most IEEE journals now request code upon acceptance, not submission. Regarding your 2.3% improvement.that is borderline. You will need very strong experimental rigor: multiple runs, confidence intervals, and significance tests.

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Eshan Patil Growing 70 pts · Accepted answer

Great question.I went through something very similar in my second year.

The key insight for me was that LoRA is actually quite well-suited for NER tasks, especially in low-resource settings. I would recommend:

  1. Use LoRA with r=8 or r=16.don't go higher for 8K samples
  2. Apply LoRA to attention layers only, not the feed-forward layers
  3. Use a cosine learning rate schedule with warm-up (10% of steps)

For Telugu-English code-mixed NER specifically, you might also look at MuRIL.it is pretrained on Indian language data and often outperforms XLM-R on Indic tasks even with less fine-tuning data.

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Rohan Desai Distinguished 950 pts · Accepted answer

If you are not already using a reading group format with your students, I would strongly recommend it. Forces everyone to articulate what they read.