Frontiers in Microbiology Response to Reviewers: How to Win the Interactive Review (2026)
How to write a point-by-point response to reviewers for Frontiers in Microbiology, where the review is a live collaborative forum, acceptance turns on validity not impact, and every assigned reviewer must endorse your paper before it publishes.
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Frontiers in Microbiology at a glance
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What makes this journal worth targeting
- IF 4.5 puts Frontiers in Microbiology in a visible tier — citations from papers here carry real weight.
- Scope specificity matters more than impact factor for most manuscript decisions.
- Acceptance rate of ~~40-50% means fit determines most outcomes.
When to look elsewhere
- When your paper sits at the edge of the journal's stated scope — borderline fit rarely improves after submission.
- If timeline matters: Frontiers in Microbiology takes ~~90-120 days median. A faster-turnaround journal may suit a grant or job deadline better.
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How to use this page well
These pages work best when they behave like tools, not essays. Use the quick structure first, then apply it to the exact journal and manuscript situation.
Question | What to do |
|---|---|
Use this page for | Building a point-by-point response that is easy for reviewers and editors to trust. |
Start with | State the reviewer concern clearly, then pair each response with the exact evidence or revision. |
Common mistake | Sounding defensive or abstract instead of specific about what changed. |
Best next step | Turn the response into a visible checklist or matrix before you finalize the letter. |
Quick answer: A Frontiers in Microbiology response to reviewers happens inside a live collaborative review forum, not as a single uploaded rebuttal file. After an independent review phase the editor activates the interactive review, releases the reports, and you reply directly to each comment, usually within 7, 10, or 14 days.
Acceptance turns on validity, not impact: the manuscript must be endorsed by a majority of the assigned, non-withdrawn reviewers, and the names of endorsing reviewers are published on the accepted article, so write every reply as a dialogue you would sign.
For every change, give the page and line reference from the revised file so each reviewer can verify it fast. Start with the Frontiers in Microbiology rebuttal readiness check before you reply in the forum, or work through this guide by hand. For broader cluster context, see the Frontiers in Microbiology journal overview.
What does a Frontiers in Microbiology response to reviewers require?
The Manusights Frontiers in Microbiology rebuttal scan. This guide tells you what the handling editor and the assigned reviewers look for in a Frontiers in Microbiology forum response. The scan tells you whether YOUR replies resolve every structured review question before the editor checks whether each reviewer can endorse. In our pre-submission review work with Frontiers in Microbiology manuscripts, the patterns below are the same ones reviewers withhold endorsement over. We do not train AI on your manuscript and delete it within 24 hours.
Four things make a Frontiers in Microbiology rebuttal different from a generic one. First, it is a collaborative, interactive review: after reviewers file independent reports, the editor opens a forum where you and the reviewers talk in near-real time, so your reply is a turn in a conversation, not a sealed letter.
Second, acceptance is validity-based, not impact-based: Frontiers states it does not reject on perceived impact and sets no rejection rate, so arguing that your microbiology result is important persuades no one, while demonstrating methodological soundness does.
Third, the work must be endorsed by a majority of the assigned, non-withdrawn reviewers, and those endorsing names are published on your article. Fourth, reviewers score you against a standardized, article-type-specific questionnaire, so an unanswered structured question is a concrete reason a reviewer can decline to endorse.
Our methodology for this guide: we reviewed Frontiers' own collaborative-review and peer-review guidelines, checked them against the Frontiers in Microbiology editor guidelines, and compared both to our own pre-submission reviews of Frontiers in Microbiology rebuttals. Every claim below traces to a primary source or our review corpus. Use this guide to pressure-test your forum replies before you submit the revision and post in the interactive review.
Element | What Frontiers in Microbiology expects | What reviewers flag in the forum |
|---|---|---|
Venue | Replies posted inside the interactive review forum | A rebuttal written as a standalone file with no forum dialogue |
Acceptance basis | Validity: methods, controls, statistics, conclusions | Arguing impact or novelty when the bar is soundness |
Endorsement | Resolve every reviewer so each can endorse | Leaving one reviewer's question unresolved |
Structured questions | Answer each item on the review questionnaire | Free-form prose that skips a flagged questionnaire item |
Specificity | Page and line number for every manuscript change | "We have revised the text" with no location |
Tone | Constructive, signed-quality dialogue | Defensive, since endorsing reviewer names are published |
Source: Frontiers collaborative-review and Frontiers in Microbiology editor guidelines, accessed June 2026.
The copyable Frontiers in Microbiology forum-response template
Because your replies live in a threaded forum, each one should stand alone: the reviewer who reads comment 2.1 should not need to scroll to comment 1.3 for context. Copy this skeleton, post one block per reviewer comment in the forum thread, and replace the bracketed text with your own changes. Quote the reviewer's words first, then your reply, with the manuscript location for every change.
To the Handling Editor and Reviewers,
Thank you for the constructive reports on our manuscript the manuscript title
([Manuscript ID]). We have revised the manuscript and respond to
each comment below in the review forum. Reviewer comments are quoted
in bold; our replies follow in plain text, with revised-manuscript
page and line numbers given for every change.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Reviewer 1
Comment 1.1: "The strain identity is asserted but not confirmed by
16S rRNA or whole-genome sequencing."
Response: We agree. We have added 16S rRNA sequencing and confirmed
the identity against the type strain (new Table 1; deposited under
[accession]). See Methods, page 6, lines 8 to 17.
Comment 1.2: "Growth experiments lack biological replicates."
Response: We have repeated the assay with n = [N] independent
biological replicates and added the variance and the statistical
test to the figure legend. See Figure 2, page 11, lines 3 to 9.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Reviewer 2
Comment 2.1: "The amplicon data are not deposited in a public
repository."
Response: We have deposited the raw sequence reads at [SRA / ENA,
accession number] and updated the Data Availability statement on
page 19, lines 1 to 5.
We have resolved each point and welcome any further clarification
in the forum.
Sincerely,
[Corresponding author, on behalf of all authors]The template carries the four tokens reviewers scan for in a Frontiers forum: an opening to the editor and reviewers, a Reviewer 1 / Reviewer 2 structure, explicit action language ("we have added", "we have repeated", "we have deposited"), and a page and line reference for every change. In the forum you post each block under the matching comment thread so a reviewer can endorse item by item.
The page-and-line rule: cite the location of every change
State the exact page and line number for each manuscript revision, and reference the specific figure, table, or supplementary file you changed. This is the single most-cited rebuttal failure at Frontiers in Microbiology and across collaborative-review journals. In the interactive forum a reviewer is deciding, comment by comment, whether they can endorse. A reviewer who has to hunt for your change reads it as evasion and may leave the thread unresolved.
A reviewer who can click straight to page 6, lines 8 to 17, and see the new 16S confirmation finishes faster and endorses.
Never post "we have addressed this in the manuscript" without a location. Use the line numbers from the revised file, not the original, and note when a change is in a Supplementary figure rather than the main text.
Reviewer-text vs author-response typography
Make the reviewer's words and your reply visually distinct inside each forum post. Put each reviewer comment in bold or a quoted block, and keep your response in plain regular text directly beneath it.
In a threaded forum the editor and every assigned reviewer scan many short posts. A reply where the quoted comment and your answer blur together costs you the attention you need to earn an endorsement. The distinction is not cosmetic at Frontiers in Microbiology, because the endorsing reviewers' names are published on the accepted article.
Tone calibration: how to phrase the hard replies
Every assigned reviewer sees your tone in the shared forum, and the reviewers who endorse your paper will have their names printed on it. A defensive reply to Reviewer 1 is visible to Reviewer 2 and to the editor monitoring the thread. Calibrate.
Bad (defensive or vague) | Better (constructive and validity-focused) |
|---|---|
"The reviewer has misunderstood our method." | "We did not describe the protocol clearly; we have rewritten the Methods on page 7 so the culture conditions and controls are explicit." |
"This is an important finding for the field." | "We agree impact is not the bar here. To show the result is valid, we have added the negative control the reviewer requested (new Figure 3b, page 12)." |
"We have addressed this concern." | "We have added the requested no-template control and biological replicates (Figure 2, page 11, lines 3 to 9)." |
"The other reviewer did not raise this issue." | "We appreciate this point and have added 16S confirmation of strain identity (Table 1, page 6) to resolve it." |
"Our conclusion is obviously correct." | "We have added the statistical test the reviewer requested (Methods, page 14); the difference remains significant (p = [value])." |
The pattern that works in the forum: concede where the reviewer is right, do the work, point to the exact change, and push back only where a request is genuinely out of scope, with a reason and an alternative. A reviewer who feels heard endorses; a reviewer who feels argued at withholds.
The Frontiers in Microbiology reviewer culture you are writing into
Frontiers in Microbiology runs Frontiers' collaborative peer review, a two-phase interactive review model that is different from almost every other microbiology journal. In the first phase, reviewers assess the manuscript independently from each other and from the authors, completing a standardized review questionnaire tailored to the article type.
Once the reports are in, the editor activates the second phase and releases them to you. From there, authors and reviewers interact directly in the discussion forum, and a reviewer can enter a dialogue with the author to request clarifications or further revisions. Your response to reviewers is therefore a live conversation, not a sealed letter you upload once.
The review is single-anonymized: reviewers know who the authors are, but you do not learn the reviewers' identities during the process. That changes after acceptance, because the names of the reviewers who endorsed publication appear on the published article. So the people you are negotiating with in the forum are the people whose names will sit on your paper. Write accordingly.
The defining acceptance rule is validity, not impact, which puts methodological rigor at the center of every reply you write. Frontiers states plainly that it does not reject manuscripts based on their perceived potential impact and sets no rejection rate, formal or informal.
Instead, every submission must be VALID: a valid research question and hypothesis, a relevant theoretical frame, correct and transparent methodology and study design, conclusions supported by sufficient data, adequate grounding in the literature, and adherence to ethical policies. For a microbiology paper that means strain identity, contamination controls, replicate structure, and data deposition are the levers, not the size of the claim.
The collaborative forum exists in part to resolve reviewer disagreement in the open. When two reviewers weigh a methods question differently, the editor watches the thread and the dialogue settles it, so your job is to give both reviewers the same sound, validity-focused answer rather than a different framing for each. The practical consequence for your rebuttal: never argue that your finding is important. Show that it is sound.
Acceptance also has a hard mechanical gate. A manuscript must be endorsed by a majority of the assigned, non-withdrawn reviewers, and a reviewer can withdraw from the review at any time.
With the two reviewers typical of a Frontiers in Microbiology paper, that majority is effectively unanimous: if one reviewer is unconvinced, they can simply not endorse, or withdraw, and your revision stalls. So the goal of your forum response is not to satisfy "the reviewers" in the abstract; it is to give every individual reviewer a concrete reason to click endorse on every structured question they raised.
Key Insight
At Frontiers in Microbiology, acceptance requires a majority of non-withdrawn reviewers to endorse your paper, and their names get published on it. One unresolved question from one reviewer is enough to stall the whole revision, so treat the forum as a per-reviewer endorsement campaign, not a one-shot rebuttal.
What our Frontiers in Microbiology rebuttal reviews surface
In our pre-submission review work with Frontiers in Microbiology submissions, the forum responses that stall in a second interactive round share a small set of recurring weaknesses. These are the same ones reviewers withhold endorsement over, and because the collaborative model gives reviewers a direct reply button, each weakness usually produces a visible follow-up question in the thread.
In our analysis of Frontiers in Microbiology rebuttals, each weakness below maps to a specific, named failure pattern in the collaborative-review culture, and each is testable against your own draft replies before you post them.
Treating the interactive forum like a one-shot rebuttal.
The most common pattern in our Frontiers in Microbiology pre-submission reviews is an author who writes one long rebuttal letter, uploads a revised manuscript, and goes quiet, when the forum is a dialogue. A reviewer who asks a follow-up clarification about a contamination control and gets no further reply will not endorse.
Across our Frontiers in Microbiology rebuttal reviews, going silent after the first post is the single strongest predictor of a stalled interactive round. Stay in the forum until every reviewer has endorsed.
Arguing impact when the criterion is validity.
Because authors are conditioned by impact-gated journals, they answer a Frontiers in Microbiology reviewer's methods concern with a paragraph about why the finding matters. The criterion here is soundness, not importance.
In our Frontiers in Microbiology pre-submission reviews we find a reply that defends the significance of a result while leaving the requested replicate structure or statistical analysis untouched, and we observe that editors routinely flag exactly this gap before a reviewer declines to endorse. Resolve the validity question; the impact argument is wasted breath in this forum.
Leaving one reviewer's structured question unresolved. Reviewers score you against a standardized questionnaire, so an unanswered item is a concrete reason to decline endorsement. In our pre-submission review work with Frontiers in Microbiology manuscripts, responses that resolve Reviewer 1 thoroughly but skip one of Reviewer 2's questions about data availability or strain identity consistently draw a withheld endorsement, which, under the majority-of-non-withdrawn rule, is enough to block acceptance. Map every reply to a specific reviewer comment and confirm none is orphaned.
Generic acknowledgment without a page or line number. A reply that says "we have revised the manuscript accordingly" forces the reviewer to hunt for the change in a long revised methods section. In our Frontiers in Microbiology pre-submission reviews, responses that omit the location of each figure, table, or text change consistently draw a forum follow-up asking where the change is, which adds a round and risks a withdrawal. Every reply needs the page and line number of the revised file.
Stay in the forum, answer validity not impact, resolve every reviewer's questions, and document each location. That four-part discipline is what separates a Frontiers in Microbiology forum response that earns every endorsement from one that stalls into a second interactive round. Check your Frontiers in Microbiology point-by-point response for these patterns before you post.
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See how this manuscript scores against Frontiers in Microbiology's requirements before you submit.
When to comply and when to push back
Situation | Recommended approach at Frontiers in Microbiology |
|---|---|
Reviewer requests confirmation of strain identity (16S or genome) | Comply. Run it, add the table and accession, cite the page and line. |
Reviewer flags missing controls or replicates | Comply. This is the highest-leverage validity fix; do the controls. |
Reviewer questions statistics or sample size | Comply. Add the test and replicate structure to Methods. |
Reviewer asks you to deposit sequence or amplicon data | Comply. Deposit, cite the accession, update Data Availability. |
Reviewer requests an experiment that is genuinely out of scope | Push back in the forum with a reason, add an alternative analysis, note the limitation. |
A reviewer goes quiet after your reply | Post a brief, polite follow-up in the thread; an unconfirmed reviewer cannot endorse. |
Source: Manusights pre-submission reviews of Frontiers in Microbiology-targeted resubmissions, 2025 cohort.
If you are unsure which reviewer questions a Frontiers in Microbiology referee would withhold endorsement over, scan your Frontiers in Microbiology forum response for unresolved validity gaps before the interactive phase opens.
How much work a Frontiers in Microbiology rebuttal actually takes
Authors consistently underestimate the validity work and overestimate the writing. This breakdown is about workload, not the journal's decision clock; for the end-to-end schedule, see the Frontiers in Microbiology review time guide.
Rebuttal task | Where the effort goes | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
Reading the standardized questionnaires | Mapping each structured item to a required change | A careful pass per reviewer, not a skim |
Running validity experiments | Controls, replicates, strain confirmation, deposition | The bulk of the work, often the binding constraint on the 7-to-14-day window |
Writing the per-comment forum replies | One reply plus a page and line reference per item | Less than authors fear once the data exist |
Staying live in the interactive forum | Answering reviewer follow-ups until each endorses | Skipped most often, and it is what stalls revisions |
Co-author sign-off before posting | All authors confirm accuracy before the forum exchange | One pass, because endorsing reviewer names will be public |
Source: Manusights pre-submission reviews of Frontiers in Microbiology resubmissions, 2025 cohort, last updated June 7, 2026.
Honest friction: rejection is real even with no rejection target
Frontiers setting no rejection rate does not mean acceptance is automatic. The journal rejects manuscripts that fail the validity criteria, and Frontiers runs research-integrity checks before, during, and after review that can stop a paper outside the reviewers' hands.
In the interactive phase, a paper can still end in rejection if a reviewer's validity concern is never resolved or if a reviewer withdraws and the remaining endorsements no longer form a majority. Most stalls at this stage trace to one cause: the author argued impact instead of fixing the methods question the reviewer actually raised.
The second most common is going silent in the forum so a reviewer's follow-up never gets an answer and the endorsement never comes.
Think twice before you post your forum response if any of these are true. The response uses generic "we have addressed this" language with no page or line numbers. A reviewer flagged a control, replicate, or strain-identity gap and you answered with prose about significance. One of Reviewer 2's structured questions has no matching reply. You plan to upload the revision and stop checking the forum. Fixing these before you post is what keeps an interactive round from ending in a withdrawn endorsement.
Common mistakes a Frontiers in Microbiology reviewer spots in seconds
Before you post in the forum, scan your own replies for the patterns that draw an immediate follow-up or a withheld endorsement. Each is a specific, checkable thing in your draft, not a vague quality dimension.
- A one-shot upload with no forum dialogue. Treating the interactive review like a sealed rebuttal letter and going quiet is the single most common cause of a stalled second round. Stay live until every reviewer endorses.
- An impact argument where a validity fix was requested. A reviewer asked for a control, replicate, or strain confirmation and the reply defends why the result matters.
The bar is soundness; the argument is wasted.
- An orphaned reviewer question. A structured questionnaire item from one reviewer with no matching reply. Under the majority-of-non-withdrawn-reviewers rule, one unresolved question can block acceptance.
- A reply with no location. Any "we have revised the manuscript" with no page and line number reads as evasion the moment a reviewer cannot find the change in the forum.
How does this guide go beyond the Frontiers in Microbiology author guidelines?
The official guidelines tell you to respond to reviewers in the collaborative forum and to address all comments. They do not tell you what those rules feel like when one unresolved reviewer can stall the revision.
Four facts change how you write every reply: acceptance requires a majority of non-withdrawn reviewers to endorse, a single quiet reviewer can stall your paper, the criterion is validity rather than impact, and the endorsing reviewers' names get printed on your article. The patterns above come from our pre-submission reviews of Frontiers in Microbiology rebuttals, and they are testable against your own draft today.
- Manusights pre-submission reviews of Frontiers in Microbiology-targeted manuscripts (2025 cohort)
Frequently asked questions
It happens in a live collaborative review forum, not a single uploaded rebuttal file. After the independent review phase, the handling editor activates the interactive review and releases the reports. You reply directly to each reviewer's comment inside the forum and submit a revised manuscript, usually within 7, 10, or 14 days depending on the depth of revision the editor set. Reviewers can then reply back and ask for clarification, so treat it as a dialogue, not a one-shot letter.
Acceptance requires the manuscript to be endorsed by a majority of the assigned, non-withdrawn reviewers. In practice, with two reviewers that means you usually need both, because a reviewer can withdraw from the forum at any time and stop counting. A reviewer who keeps one question unresolved can simply decline to endorse, so leaving any single comment unanswered is what stalls a Frontiers in Microbiology revision.
No. Frontiers does not reject manuscripts on perceived impact and sets no rejection rate. Acceptance turns on whether the work is VALID: a valid research question, correct and transparent methodology, conclusions supported by the data, sound ethics, and adequate grounding in the literature. Arguing that your finding is important does not move a reviewer; demonstrating that your methods and controls are sound does.
Yes, for the reviewers who endorse it. When a manuscript is accepted, the names of the reviewers who endorsed publication appear on the published article. That makes the interactive exchange semi-public in spirit: a reviewer is putting their name on your paper, so a gracious, evidence-based forum dialogue matters more than at journals where reviewers stay fully anonymous.
Reviewers do not write free-form reports. They complete a subject-specific, article-type-tailored questionnaire that asks structured questions about the validity, rigor, and quality of the work: research question, methods, controls, statistics, data availability, and ethics. Your response must resolve each structured question the reviewer flagged, because the questionnaire is what the editor reads when deciding whether the reviewer can endorse.
Sources
- Peer review guidelines, Frontiers (accessed June 2026)
- What is the peer review process at Frontiers? (accessed June 2026)
- Editor guidelines, Frontiers in Microbiology (accessed June 2026)
- The review process: making decisions on manuscripts, Frontiers (accessed June 2026)
- Ten simple rules for writing a response to reviewers, William Stafford Noble, PLOS Computational Biology (accessed June 2026)
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