Thursday, December 11, 2025
an essential tool for workshopping reviewer feedback
Last week I received reviewer feedback on a Registered Report I had submitted to undertake quantitative research into the social impact of silence as a spiritual practice.
A Registered Report involves submitting an academic journal in two stages. Stage 1 involves blind peer review of the proposed methods and analysis plan. If these are accepted, Stage 2 involves doing the research and writing up the results and discussion for further blind peer review.
Registered Reports have many advantages. First, they promote transparency by sharing research results no matter the outcome. Second, they enhance research quality by allowing a study design to be workshopped. It’s far better to catch a mistake in my design before I begin, rather than have it pointed out after I’ve gathered the data.
After letting the feedback sit for a few days, this week I have built a table.
It has a column for each of the 3 reviewers. It also has rows to gather the different areas of feedback. In this case, the feedback included comments with suggestions about my design, theory, data gathering and analysis.
I make a table to ensure I hear the affirmations. When reviewers say things like “exciting” and “compelling” and “interesting,” I need to be encouraged and say thankyou.
A table also helps me look for patterns across the reviewers. Where are the reviewers saying the same thing that I really need to do more work? Are there questions raised by Reviewer 1 that might actually be answered by Reviewer 3?
Finally, a table gives me an overview of what needs to be done. I can feel a bit overwhelmed by the feedback. In this case it was over 3,000 words! So having a table breaks things down and and enables me to develop a checklist of things to work through.
Over time, I will add a further column, which is what I have actually done in response to the Reviewer feedback. What have I changed? What do I disagree with and why? This I will use when I resubmit the Registered Report, to show my workings.
(For more on responding to reviewer feedback, I have co-authored an open-access journal article with Lynne Taylor, Elaine Heath and Nigel Rooms, “Courageous, purposeful, and reflexive; Writing as a missional and emergent task,” Ecclesial Futures 2 (2), (2021), 99-120, here.
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