Applied Sciences Response to Reviewers: How to Write a Rebuttal That Wins

Applied Sciences is a broad-scope MDPI journal with a 2024 impact factor of 2.5, a Q2 rank of 50 out of 175 in Engineering, Multidisciplinary, and a first decision in roughly 16 days. Three features of its reviewer culture should shape every line of your rebuttal, and they are different from what you would write for a slow, prestige-gated venue.

First, the rounds are fast and the second-round reviewers are on a tight clock. MDPI asks reviewers re-checking a revised manuscript to respond within about three days. That speed is the journal's product, and it works only when your letter is navigable. A reviewer who can jump straight to page 8, line 214 and see the change will sign off. A reviewer who has to hunt will ask for another round, which on a fast journal feels like a failure of the author, not the process.

Second, the bar is methodological rigor and section-scope fit, not novelty. Applied Sciences runs single-blind review with at least two reviewers and judges whether the methods, validation, and data support the claims, and whether the work belongs in the section you chose. So your responses should argue from evidence and scope, never from significance. "This result is important" is the wrong register here.

"We added the validation in Table 3 and report effect sizes on page 9" is the right one. When the two reviewers split, the section's academic editor weighs the reports, so a response that resolves the reviewer disagreement with located evidence rather than rhetoric carries real weight at the decision.

Third, open peer review is on the table. MDPI offers optional open peer review on every journal, including Applied Sciences, and when an author opts in the reviewer reports and the author responses publish alongside the paper. About 21% of MDPI authors chose it in 2024. If you opt in, your rebuttal is a public document with your name on it. Write it as one: no off-record complaints, no sarcasm, no asides that read fine in a private letter but look defensive in print.

State this convention once at the top of your letter and follow it for every response: every manuscript change is cited by page number and line number in the revised file, for example see page 8, lines 214 to 221. This one habit does more to shorten an MDPI round than any tone trick, because it lets a reviewer on a 3-day re-check confirm your edit in seconds instead of re-reading the paper.

Two refinements that matter at Applied Sciences specifically. Cite the revised file's locations, not the original's, and say so, because line numbers shift after edits. And when a change touches a figure, a table, and the text, name all three: "Table 3, Figure 4, and page 9, lines 251 to 268." Reviewers re-checking quickly will look at exactly the artifacts you point them to and nothing else.

Honest friction first: a "major revision" decision at Applied Sciences is not an acceptance, and rebuttals do fail. The most common path to a rejection on revision is not a weak letter; it is a manuscript whose core soundness problem cannot be fixed by rewriting. If a reviewer's central objection is that the validation does not support the central claim, no amount of point-by-point politeness saves it.

The majority of failed second rounds we see trace to authors who answered the easy comments thoroughly and the hard soundness comment with a paragraph of reassurance.

Three patterns that turn a revision into a rejection or a stuck file at Applied Sciences:

• Answering soundness with significance. A reviewer says the method is not validated; the author replies that the topic is timely. The reviewer escalates, and the second round ends in rejection.

• Refusing a scope-fit comment. A reviewer says the work belongs in a different section or a different journal. Arguing instead of either re-scoping the framing or accepting a transfer usually stalls the file.

• Silent partial changes. The author changes some things and quietly leaves others, hoping the reviewer will not notice. On a 3-day re-check the reviewer notices, and trust for the rest of the letter drops.

If the central soundness objection is real and unfixable, the faster move is to withdraw and re-target a better-fit venue rather than burn two rounds. See rejected from Applied Sciences: where to submit next for the cascade. The rebuttal craft on this page wins fixable rounds; it cannot rescue a paper the data does not support.

In our pre-submission review work with Applied Sciences manuscripts, three rebuttal-stage patterns generate the most consistent extra revision rounds, and all three are testable against your own draft response before you upload it. We surface these from the editorial findings across the Applied Sciences and broader MDPI manuscripts coming through our pre-submission review pipeline, where the same comment types recur across the journal's 32 sections.

The unlocated change. The most frequent pattern, by a wide margin, is a response that claims a fix without a page and line reference. In our Applied Sciences pre-submission reviews, letters that describe edits in prose ("we clarified the methods") rather than by location force the second-round reviewer to re-read, and on a fast MDPI clock that reliably produces another round.

The fix is mechanical: every response sentence about the methods, figures, or statistical analysis ends with the exact line range in the revised file. We flag every response that asserts a change without a location.

Significance answers to soundness comments. Across our Applied Sciences reviews, the second most common failure is answering a validation or methods soundness comment with an importance argument. Applied Sciences reviewers judge whether the data support the claim, so a response that pivots to why the work matters reads as an evasion. The pattern is testable: for each comment, check whether your response adds evidence (a new experiment, a control, an effect size, a citation) or merely re-asserts the claim. If it only re-asserts, the reviewer will too.

Scope-fit refusals. The third pattern specific to Applied Sciences is the section-scope dispute. Because the journal spans 32 sections, reviewers frequently raise whether a paper fits the section it was submitted to, or ask for experiments that belong to a neighboring field. In our pre-submission work with Applied Sciences manuscripts, authors who refuse these outright stall; authors who either re-anchor the framing to the chosen section's aims or propose an in-scope alternative experiment keep moving.

We check every response to a scope comment for an alternative offer rather than a flat refusal, and we check that the references and discussion actually argue the section fit rather than asserting it.

These three are the highest-leverage fixes we apply to Applied Sciences rebuttals before submission. A reader can audit their own draft against all three in about ten minutes: locate every change, convert every significance answer into an evidence answer, and turn every scope refusal into a scope argument or an alternative. Run an Applied Sciences point-by-point response review to have these flagged automatically, or work the checklist by hand.

Here is how the three pieces combine on one comment. The reviewer writes that the statistical analysis is incomplete. The Bad response: "Our analysis is standard and the results are significant." The Better response, located and evidence-first: "We agree the analysis was incomplete. We added effect sizes and 95% confidence intervals for all primary comparisons and a sensitivity analysis for the main result. See page 9, lines 251 to 268, and the revised Table 3." Same comment, two outcomes. The first invites a second round; the second ends it.

When you are unsure whether a response is located and evidence-first enough, the test is simple: could a reviewer who has three days verify your claim without re-reading the paper? If yes, you are done. If no, add the location and the evidence. To check a full draft letter against all three Applied Sciences patterns at once, run an Applied Sciences revision-letter check before you upload.

• Manusights pre-submission review corpus, Applied Sciences-targeted manuscripts (2025 to 2026)