RMarkdown template for responses to peer-review comments

This package provides an Rmarkdown template for writing clear, professional-looking and consistently formatted responses to peer-review comments on scientific papers.

Rationale

Responding to comments on a manuscript is an essential yet sometimes daunting part of the peer-review process, particularly as clear and well-crafted responses are often tedious to formulate but can go a long way towards ensuring acceptance. respondR was designed to take away some of that strain by providing a user-friendly RMarkdown template that can produce professional-looking and consistently formatted response documents — encouraging authors to focus on content rather than style.

In particular, respondR conforms to best practice rules for academic peer-reviewing Noble (2017), and facilitates the tasks of:

  • Providing an overview of edits (Rule 1).
  • Making the response self-contained (Rule 3).
  • Using typography to assist reviewers and editors in navigating the response (Rule 6).
  • Clearly identifying the changes made to the submitted draft (Rule 9).

Installation

The package and associated template can be installed using the following command:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("pjbouchet/respondR")

respondR is built around two core files:

  • A Microsoft Word (.docx) document housing the content of the response.
  • An RMarkdown document (and LaTeX backend) used for formatting.

The idea is to write up responses to reviewer comments in Word using the provided template, and subsequently generate a formatted PDF directly from within RStudio.

After installation, follow these simple steps:

  • Step 1: In RStudio, go to File > New File > R Markdown > From Template [Note: You may need to restart RStudio first].
  • Step 2: Select the Response to Reviewers template from the list and click OK. This will create an Rmd file, populated with a default template.
  • Step 3: Save the file to disk.
  • Step 4: Knit the document by going to File > Knit Document or clicking on the Knit icon in the top bar of the Rstudio editor and choosing Knit to response.
  • Step 5: Fill in the Microsoft Word table template (see the vignette).
  • Step 6: Knit the Rmd file.

Final step: Say “Abracadabra”!

Further details on how to use the template are given in the package vignette.

Comments and bug reports

Found a bug? Would like to see a feature? Please submit an issue or send a pull request to the Github repository.

Colophon

The template provided was inspired by the Monash University R Markdown templates available in package MonashEBSTemplates.