MNRAS Response to Reviewers: How to Write a Rebuttal That Wins (2026)

MNRAS reviewer culture differs from a high-prestige selective journal in three ways that change how you write a rebuttal.

A tiered editorial model: one editor, two or more referees

The editorial model is tiered. Each paper is assigned to a Scientific Editor, a member of the Editorial Board who is a practicing astronomer, and that editor in most cases solicits the opinion of two or more expert referees. Assistant Editors run the administrative thread and are your point of contact. You are therefore writing to an editor who understands the subfield and to at least two referees, and the editor weighs your response against all the reports together.

Rigor over headline significance

MNRAS referees grade scientific rigor rather than headline significance. The Instructions to Authors expect a rigorous and complete analysis, and the journal draws on a broad subfield reviewer pool, so methodological rigor is the axis your rebuttal is judged on. Referees in observational, numerical, and theoretical astronomy check where rigor is most often thin:

• the error budget and systematic uncertainties
• the numerical convergence and resolution tests
• the comparison to the existing astronomy literature

A rebuttal that argues "this result is important for the field" answers a question MNRAS referees are not primarily asking. The reply that clears re-refereeing instead shows the uncertainties are characterized, the simulations are converged, and the claims are bounded by the evidence.

A bounded, re-refereeable timeline

The revision can be re-refereed and the timeline is bounded. If the revisions are substantial, the Scientific Editor decides whether to accept, return the paper to a referee for a second review, or return it to the authors for further revision, and the cycle can repeat for a second or third round.

MNRAS also sets firm revision deadlines: roughly six months for a major revision, three months for a moderate revision, and 45 days for a minor revision. MNRAS Letters, which run to roughly 5 pages, get tighter windows of two months and one month. A rigor-first editor reading several referees with the option to re-refer means one thing for you: a complete first response that adds the requested analysis to the manuscript is the single most effective way to avoid an extra round.

The standard MNRAS rebuttal has a predictable shape, and following it makes the editor's job easy:

1. Open to the Scientific Editor with a short paragraph summarizing the major changes and confirming that a full point-by-point response follows.

1. Split by referee (Referee 1 / Referee 2), quoting each comment in full.

1. Answer each comment with your response and the specific manuscript revision, located by page and line or by section, figure, table, or equation number.

1. Highlight the changed text in the revised file so the referee can confirm each edit at a glance.

The named failure pattern: authors who answer the encouraging referee in depth and the skeptical referee thinly lose time. The skeptical referee is usually the one the Scientific Editor weights when deciding whether to re-refer.

In astronomy rebuttals the change a referee cannot find is the one that sinks the revision. For every referee comment, your response must point to the exact page and line where the revision appears, or, because pagination shifts every time you recompile the mnras2e LaTeX file, to the section, figure, table, or equation number. Write "Section 3.2, page 6, lines 12-41, new Table 3," not "we have updated the manuscript."

An MNRAS referee re-checking a revision, often a new independent referee reading your response cold, has no incentive to go searching. If they cannot locate the edit, they record the comment as unaddressed, and a single unaddressed rigor comment is exactly what turns a major revision into another round or a reject.

A few habits keep your references stable across the LaTeX recompile:

• Pair stable cross-references (section, figure, equation) alongside page and line, so the location survives reformatting.
• Re-check every page and line number after the final recompile, not before.
• Highlight the changed text in the file, in bold or color, as MNRAS asks.

You can check whether every MNRAS referee comment maps to a locatable change before you upload the revision.

MNRAS's own rule here is narrow but firm: the Instructions to Authors ask only that changes to the manuscript be highlighted, in bold or color, to assist the referee and Editor. The response letter format is left to you. That freedom is where many astronomy rebuttals get muddy.

The convention that scans well in practice keeps three voices visually separate:

• Set referee comments in black italic, quoted verbatim.
• Set author responses in plain blue, opened with a bold "Response:".
• Quote any revised manuscript text inside an indented box.

The point is that a Scientific Editor reading three or more reports at once should never have to guess where the referee's voice ends and yours begins. When referee and author text run together in one undifferentiated block, the editor cannot quickly confirm that every comment was answered, and that ambiguity raises the odds of a second referee round.

This is the honest-friction part, and rejection on revision is a real MNRAS outcome, not a theoretical one. Because a substantial revision can be returned to a referee and the editor reads your response against all the reports, a rebuttal that fights the wrong battle does not just extend the timeline. It can move the paper from a major revision toward a rejection.

Two terminal outcomes are worth understanding before you decide to dig in:

• Reject. MNRAS confirms a Reject decision with a second editor, and once it lands the authors may not submit a revised version.

• Withdraw. Authors are advised the paper is unsuitable; a withdrawn paper can be resubmitted only as a new version, and only if you can adequately address the report.

In the majority of revision rounds the paper is not rejected. But the share that flips to rejection is driven by the same thing every time: a referee's core rigor concern left unanswered.

Most disputes are not worth contesting. If a referee asks for a complete error budget, a convergence test, completeness corrections, or comparison to the existing astronomy literature, comply. These are exactly the rigor checks MNRAS referees are instructed to apply, and refusing them reads as the paper failing the journal's core bar.

Push back only when a request would reduce scientific correctness or falls outside the rigor criteria, and even then, make a clarifying edit and propose an alternative rather than refusing flat. Treat the first response as the round that decides whether the paper is re-refereed: spend it answering every comment in full, not on winning an argument about significance that MNRAS referees were never grading.

In our pre-submission review work with MNRAS submissions and rebuttals, three patterns generate the most consistent re-refereeing and reject-on-revision outcomes. Each is testable against your own response before you upload the revision.

An error analysis that survives into the rebuttal unchanged. The most common reason an MNRAS revision goes back to the referee is that the response argues the result rather than fixing the statistical analysis and systematic uncertainties. MNRAS referees grade rigor, so when an observational paper quotes a precision that the data and reduction cannot actually support, or reports detections with statistical errors only, a referee reads the gap as the paper not meeting the journal's rigor bar.

Across our MNRAS pre-submission reviews, rebuttals that add a complete error budget separating statistical from systematic terms, including calibration, background, and completeness corrections, clear re-refereeing; rebuttals that defend the original uncertainties do not. The fix is mechanical: add the missing error analysis to the methods, tabulate it, and cite the table by section and page.

Numerical results left without convergence or resolution tests. MNRAS publishes a large volume of numerical astrophysics, so for simulation papers, convergence tests and resolution studies are the second failure pattern. In our pre-submission reviews of MNRAS manuscripts, the rebuttals that fail here answer a convergence comment with prose ("the resolution is standard") instead of with a test.

The pattern that clears is concrete: add a convergence study at additional resolutions, show the key quantity is converged in a new figure, describe the test in an appendix, and point the referee to the exact section. A convergence comment answered with a new test in the manuscript is satisfied; the same comment answered with reassurance is not, and one unsatisfied rigor comment is enough to send the paper to a second referee round.

Literature comparison and selective answering across referees. The third pattern is partly scientific and partly structural. MNRAS referees expect explicit comparison to the existing astronomy literature, and theory or modeling papers are expected to connect their predictions to observable quantities current or near-future facilities can measure; a rebuttal that omits this comparison invites a repeat comment. Because MNRAS routes the paper through two or more referees and the Scientific Editor reads all threads, an under-answered second referee is also a frequent cause of another round.

In our MNRAS pre-submission reviews, we flag any rebuttal where one referee's comments receive substantially shorter responses, where a requested equation revision or citation to a missing constraint is acknowledged but not actually added, or where a figure the referee questioned is defended without revision. The fix is to answer every comment from both referees with an action verb and a locatable reference, and to make the harder referee's requested change visible in the manuscript, not just in the letter.

These three patterns are why an MNRAS rebuttal is not interchangeable with a Nature Astronomy or Astrophysical Journal rebuttal. The Scientific-Editor-plus-multiple-referee, rigor-first structure rewards complete error analysis, demonstrated numerical convergence, and full literature contact over argument, and it punishes selective or defensive responses with another referee round. A response that adds real error budgets, real convergence tests, and full coverage of every referee is the one that survives MNRAS re-refereeing.

• Every comment from every referee is answered with an action verb and a locatable reference (page and line, or section, figure, table, or equation) to the revised manuscript.
• Rigor requests (error budgets, systematic uncertainties, convergence tests, completeness corrections, literature comparison) are addressed with new manuscript content, not prose reassurance.
• The harder referee's comments receive responses at least as thorough as the friendlier referee's, and changes are highlighted in the revised file.
• The tone is firm only on scientific rigor, never defensive on presentation, and all cited DOIs in the revised reference list are clean.