IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems Response to Reviewers: How to Write a Rebuttal That Wins (2026)

State the exact page and line number for each manuscript revision, and name the specific figure, table, or equation you changed in the revised PDF. This is the single most-cited rebuttal failure at T-ITS and across IEEE Transactions. A reviewer who has to hunt for your change reads it as evasion, and under a three-round cap that lost goodwill is expensive: there is no fourth round to recover it.

A reviewer who can jump straight to page 9, lines 4 to 19, and see the new real-traffic evaluation finishes faster and re-reviews more favorably. Two habits keep your location lines trustworthy in a capped review:

• Number against the revised file. Adding a real-traffic experiment or a new table shifts every line below it, so re-check your references after each round of edits, never against the original submission.

• Flag changes outside the main text. When a revision lands in a supplementary file rather than the main PDF, say so explicitly so the reviewer knows where to look.

Never write "we have addressed this in the manuscript" without a location.

The reviewers and the Associate Editor see your tone across every comment. A defensive reply to Reviewer 1 is visible to Reviewers 2 and 3 and shapes how the AE reads the whole letter. Calibrate.

The pattern that works: concede where the reviewer is right, do the actual ITS work, point to the exact change, and push back only on a request that is genuinely out of scope, with a reason and an alternative.

The round cap that reshapes how you write

T-ITS is Associate-Editor-led. An Associate Editor handles your paper, integrates the reviewer reports, and recommends the decision to the Editor-in-Chief. Community data shows external peer review typically draws three reports per first round, so your rebuttal is read by a small panel, not one referee.

The defining constraint is the revision policy in force since 1 January 2022: a maximum of three review rounds, at most two revisions or rebuttals, and no major revisions after R2. That single rule reshapes how you write.

A major-revision decision in round 1 is your one real opportunity to add experiments, reframe the contribution, and bring in new data. By the second revision the paper must already be near-final, because round three can only be minor, and authors who treat R1 as a warm-up run straight into the policy wall.

SciRev community data, from a small sample, puts the first round at roughly 6.5 months with about 3.0 reports, on a 3.5 out of 5.0 handling rating. That sets your planning clock: the revision you write now will not get a fast turnaround, so it has to land.

The transportation-operations bar most authors misread

The contribution bar is the part authors get wrong most often. T-ITS scope requires a strong focus on transportation systems devoted to transportation operations for either passengers or goods, and the reviewers apply that bar to your revision, not just your original submission.

When a referee says the work reads as a generic deep-learning paper with a traffic dataset bolted on, the rebuttal that wins makes the transportation problem the protagonist, shows an operational gain a traffic engineer would care about, and validates it against real or realistic conditions. The rebuttal that loses adds three more comparison tables and restates the accuracy numbers. Validation follows the same logic: a method evaluated only in simulation has not answered a reviewer who asked whether it holds on real traffic.

How T-ITS differs from flagship and ML venues

Calibration matters because the bar shifts by venue. A response to reviewers at a flagship like Nature or Science faces a novelty-and-breadth bar and a published-rebuttal posture, while a pure machine-learning venue rewards benchmark state-of-the-art and ablations.

T-ITS sits apart from both. It wants a transportation-operations advance, validated under realistic conditions, returned inside a hard round budget. A rebuttal optimized for an ML reviewer, heavy on benchmark deltas and light on the operational story, can clear that audience and still fail the T-ITS contribution bar. That mismatch is the most common reason a strong-looking ML revision stalls here.

In our pre-submission review work with IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems submissions, the rebuttals that stall in a second revision round share a small set of recurring weaknesses. These are the same ones reviewers flag at re-review, and because the journal caps revisions at three rounds with no major revision after R2, each is more dangerous here than at a journal that lets you keep iterating.

In our analysis of T-ITS rebuttals, each weakness below maps to a specific, named failure pattern in the editorial culture, and each is testable against your own draft response before you upload it.

Answering an ITS-contribution request with more benchmark tables. The most common and most expensive pattern in our T-ITS pre-submission reviews is a rebuttal that answers "this reads as generic machine learning" by adding benchmark comparisons and ablation rows. The reviewer is asking for a transportation-operations contribution, not for more accuracy decimals.

When a referee questions whether the work belongs in an ITS journal, adding tables does not move the decision; reframing the methods around a traffic-operations problem and showing an operational result does. Across our IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems rebuttal reviews, this mismatch between what the reviewer asked for and what the author delivered is the single strongest predictor of a rejection on revision.

Simulation-only validation when the reviewer asked for real data. Because T-ITS judges validation against real or realistic-traffic conditions, a rebuttal that answers a real-data request with another simulation sweep reads as avoidance. In our IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems pre-submission reviews we routinely find a reviewer asking whether a controller or predictor holds on field traffic, answered with a larger synthetic sample size instead of a real-world figure.

If real data is genuinely unavailable, say so explicitly, add the most realistic microsimulation you can defend, and state the limitation in the discussion, rather than hoping the reviewer does not notice.

Undisclosed or minimized conference overlap. T-ITS screens for overlap and automatically rejects submissions above the 40% threshold, including overlap with your own prior work. In our pre-submission review work with IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems manuscripts, the rebuttals we flag hardest are the ones that answer "how does this differ from your conference paper" with vague language and no citation of the earlier version.

Reconcile this before submission: cite the conference paper, give a concrete list of the added contributions, and confirm the overlap is below the 40% threshold. A reviewer who suspects you are hiding the overlap will escalate.

Generic acknowledgment with no page or line number, and burning the round budget. A rebuttal that says "we have revised the manuscript accordingly" forces the reviewer to hunt through the revised PDF, and a rebuttal that saves its real experiments for R2 collides with the no-major-revision-after-R2 rule.

In our IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems pre-submission reviews, responses that omit the location of each table, equation, or text change consistently draw a re-review comment, and responses that defer heavy work to the second round consistently run out of rounds. Every reply needs a page and line number, and the first revision needs to be the heavy one.

Reframe the contribution, validate on real conditions, disclose the overlap, and spend the round budget early. That four-part discipline is what separates a T-ITS rebuttal that clears its limited rounds from one that hits the policy wall. Check your IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems point-by-point response for these patterns before you resubmit.

Source: Manusights pre-submission reviews of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems resubmissions, 2025 cohort.

Authors consistently underestimate the contribution-and-validation effort and overestimate the writing effort. This breakdown is about workload, not the journal's decision clock; for the end-to-end schedule, see the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems submission guide.

Source: Manusights pre-submission reviews of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems resubmissions, 2025 cohort, last updated June 7, 2026.

A major-revision invitation at T-ITS is not a soft acceptance, and the round cap makes the stakes sharper than at most journals. Your revised manuscript and point-by-point response go back to the original reviewers, and because no major revisions are allowed after R2, a paper that has not converged by the second revision is usually rejected rather than carried into a fourth round.

The same policy means a misjudged R1 can be fatal: spend round one on cosmetic changes and you reach round two with the hard work undone and no room to do it. Most rejections on revision trace to one cause, the author answered a contribution or real-data request with benchmark tables and text. The second most common is undisclosed conference overlap that the system or a reviewer catches late.

If a paper is rejected outright, an appeal to the Editor-in-Chief with the paper ID is possible, but only for serious review discrepancies or reviewer mishandling, not for disagreement with the decision.

Think twice before you resubmit if any of these are true:

• The response uses generic "we have addressed this" language with no page or line numbers.
• A reviewer said the work reads as generic machine learning and you answered with more benchmarks.
• A reviewer asked for real-traffic validation and you answered with simulation.
• Your conference overlap is undisclosed or downplayed.
• You are saving heavy experiments for R2, where the policy will not allow them.

Fixing these before resubmission is what keeps a second round from becoming a rejection you cannot iterate out of.

The official guidelines tell you the paper types, the page limits, and that submissions undergo a maximum of three rounds with no major revision after R2. They do not tell you how a reviewer actually reads your rebuttal.

Four facts change how you write every reply: the round cap decides which revision should carry the heavy work; reviewers apply the transportation-operations contribution bar to your rebuttal and not just your draft; a simulation-only reply rarely answers a real-data request; and undisclosed conference overlap is the quiet killer once the system flags the overlap. The patterns above come from our pre-submission reviews of T-ITS rebuttals, and they are testable against your own draft today, not theoretical concerns.

• Manusights pre-submission reviews of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems-targeted manuscripts (2025 cohort)