Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews Response to Reviewers: How to Write a Rebuttal That Wins (2026)

Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews typically assigns three to four reviewers, and the mix usually pairs a renewable-energy domain expert with a synthesis-methodology specialist. That pairing is the reviewer-culture signal that matters most for your rebuttal. You are writing to two different filters at once.

The domain expert is reading for coverage and correctness: did you miss the most-cited recent papers in the subfield, did you misstate a technology's status, is the field map accurate. The methodology specialist is reading for systematic-review rigor: is there an explicit search strategy, are inclusion and exclusion criteria stated, is there a screening flow or PRISMA-style diagram, and where a meta-analysis is claimed, are the pooled statistics valid given study heterogeneity.

A rebuttal that satisfies one and ignores the other stalls. The common pattern is a response that engages the domain expert's content comments thoroughly and waves at the methodology specialist's process comments with "we have clarified our approach." That clarification needs to be a concrete, page-referenced addition to the methods, not a sentence in the cover letter.

The format is the one Elsevier's own guidance recommends and the one RSER editors read fastest: a short executive summary, then one section per reviewer with numbered, quoted comments and your response beneath each.

Source: Elsevier author guidance on responding to reviewer comments + RSER ScienceDirect scope statement (accessed June 6, 2026).

This is the most-cited rebuttal mistake, and it is worth stating as a hard rule: for every change, cite the exact page and line number in the revised manuscript where the editor and reviewer can see it. Do not write "we have addressed this in the Discussion." Write "we have revised the Discussion on page 24, lines 7 to 23, to add the quantitative comparison the reviewer requested."

At a review journal this rule does double duty. The reviewer not only wants to confirm you changed something; they want to confirm the change is genuinely a synthesis improvement and not a cosmetic line edit. A precise page and line reference lets them jump straight to the new comparative paragraph or the expanded search-strategy table and judge it on the spot. Vague references force the reviewer to re-read the whole section, which is exactly the friction that extends a revision into another round.

Reviewers and editors read dozens of rebuttals. Make yours easy to scan. Put the reviewer's quoted comment in one visual treatment and your response in another, so the two never blur together. The simplest reliable scheme:

• Reviewer comment in bold or italic, prefixed with the reviewer and comment number (for example, Reviewer 2, Comment 3).
• Your response in plain text directly beneath it.
• Newly added or changed manuscript text in a quoted block or a distinct color, so the reviewer can see the literal revision without opening the tracked-changes file.

The typography is not decoration. When reviewer text and author response use the same font and color with no label, the methodology specialist loses the thread of which process comment you are answering, and that is when a careful rebuttal reads as evasive.

In our pre-submission review work with Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews submissions, the rebuttals that fail on revision cluster into a small set of recurring, testable patterns. These are named failure modes we observe across our pre-submission reviews of review-led energy manuscripts targeting RSER, not generic advice.

Because Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews is a review-only journal, the patterns differ from those at a general research outlet, and most are visible before you ever return the revision. In the majority of the RSER rebuttals we screen, at least one of the four patterns below is present, and any single one can turn a major revision into a rejection on revision.

Cosmetic answers to synthesis comments. This is the single most common failure we see in RSER rebuttals. A reviewer writes that the comparison reads as a catalog, and the author response edits a transition sentence and claims the synthesis is now stronger. At Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews the synthesis is the contribution, so a cosmetic answer to a structural comment fails.

The test: for every comment that uses the word "synthesis," "compare," or "framework," your response must point to a restructured section, a new comparative table, or a revised taxonomy, with the page and line number. If it points only to a reworded sentence, the comment is unanswered.

Systematic-review methodology left vague after the reviewer asked for it. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews reviewers, especially the methodology specialist on the panel, check a systematic-review claim as rigorously as a research reviewer checks experimental controls. When a first-round comment asks for the search strategy and the rebuttal answers "our selection follows established practice," the revision stalls.

The test: after revision, your methods section should let a reader reproduce the literature search, with databases, date range, keywords, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and a screening flow or PRISMA-style diagram. If a reader cannot reproduce it, the systematic-review claim will not survive the second round.

Generic change language with no page and line references. We repeatedly see RSER rebuttals that say "we have updated the manuscript accordingly" without telling the editor where. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews handling editors and reviewers will not hunt for changes across a long review article, and an unlocated change reads as no change. The test: every numbered response should contain a page and line number and, ideally, the quoted revised text.

Reference comprehensiveness treated as a formality. Because Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews is a review journal, the reference list is part of the contribution. When a reviewer flags a missing key paper, a rebuttal that simply inserts the citation without integrating it into the synthesis misses the point. The test: a new reference should appear in the comparative analysis with a stated relationship to the existing framework, not just in the bibliography.

The same discipline applies to the cleanliness of the list; verify every cited DOI against Crossref and Retraction Watch before resubmission, because a review article carrying a retracted citation undermines the synthesis it is built on.

If any of those patterns sound familiar, a RSER synthesis and rebuttal readiness scan will flag the comments you answered cosmetically before the editor does.

Most Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews first rounds return a major revision, and a strong rebuttal usually clears it. But two situations end in rejection on revision no matter how well the letter is written, and being honest about them saves months.

The first is article-type mismatch surfacing during review. If the reviewers conclude the manuscript is really original research with a long literature section rather than a genuine review, no rebuttal fixes that. The critique follows the paper, because synthesis is not a quantity of citations you can add in a revision; it is the organizing logic of the whole article. In that case the faster route is to reframe the work for a research-first venue.

The rejected-from-RSER next-steps guide maps the realistic alternatives: Applied Energy, Renewable Energy, and Energy Conversion and Management for research-shaped work.

The second is a systematic-review method that cannot be reconstructed. If the original search was opportunistic rather than systematic, you cannot retrofit a reproducible strategy that honestly describes what you did. Reviewers asked to verify a systematic claim will see the gap, and a second round confirming it usually ends in rejection. The honest move is to either rebuild the search properly before resubmitting or to reframe the manuscript as a narrative review and drop the systematic claim entirely.

Across review-only energy journals, most submissions are rejected, and a large share fail on article-type and synthesis grounds rather than on the science. A rebuttal is the right tool when the reviewers asked for deeper synthesis or a tighter method. It is the wrong tool when they told you, in effect, that the paper belongs somewhere else.

A major revision at a review journal is heavier than at a research journal, because you are reworking the synthesis itself, not just answering data questions. The effort breaks down roughly like this.

This effort breakdown is Manusights editorial guidance, not a journal-published metric.

The heaviest task by far is the middle one. A revision that adds a real comparative framework and a reproducible search strategy is slower to write than a normal rebuttal, and that is the point: the journal is judging a harder product. For how long the editorial clock itself runs, see the RSER review time guide.

Resubmission calibration. Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews handles revisions through Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager submission portal, and the manuscript constraints still apply on resubmission: a 300-word abstract limit and an 8,000-word main-text cap. Verify both against the current guide for authors before you upload.

One more detail authors forget at the revision stage: RSER is a hybrid journal, so if you opted for gold open access, the listed article publishing charge is USD 5,070 excluding taxes, and that choice is confirmed during resubmission, not before. Verify the current handling editor on the journal's editorial-team page before quoting any name in your cover letter.

• Manusights internal review of RSER-targeted resubmissions (2025 cohort)