Along with writing your first journal paper, doing a substantial revision to your manuscript upon receiving the reviewers’ comments is one often-cited painful moment of any doctoral process. This complex act of scientific communication involves balancing diplomacy with integrity, creativity and systematicity. In this post, I go over the concrete (and, sometimes, counter-intuitive) steps I follow to revise my journal papers upon receiving peer-review critiques, as well as some basic principles to increase your chances of success and avoid unnecessary suffering.

Writing research papers is one of the most dreaded (and most unavoidable) activities for many people during the PhD. In this series of posts I explore some of the reasons why writing research papers is difficult when one arrives at the PhD, and explain what concrete writing process I find myself following after more than a decade of academic writing.