This package provides an Rmarkdown template for writing clear, professional-looking and consistently formatted responses to peer-review comments on scientific papers.
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 โ 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).
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 clickOK
. 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 theKnit
icon in the top bar of the Rstudio editor and choosingKnit 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.
Found a bug? Would like to see a feature? Please submit an issue or send a pull request to the Github repository.
The template provided was inspired by the Monash University R Markdown templates available in package MonashEBSTemplates.