Response to Reviewers for Small: How to Write a Rebuttal That Clears Revision (2026)

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 Small and across the Wiley nanoscience family. A reviewer who has to hunt for your change reads it as evasion. A reviewer who can click straight to page 9, lines 4 to 19, and see the new mechanistic control finishes faster and re-reviews more favorably.

Never write "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 lives in a Supplementary figure rather than the main text, because nano papers carry most of their characterization in the SI.

The reviewers see your tone across every comment. A defensive reply to Reviewer 1 is visible to the editor who is weighing all the reports together. Calibrate. At Small the trap is defending characterization-as-advance; the fix is conceding the significance gap and closing it with a benchmark.

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

Small is editor-led: a Wiley professional editor, not an academic editor, reads the paper, routes it to the right nano subspecialty, and decides what a revision must demonstrate. External review typically uses 2 to 3 nanomaterial experts, and the journal runs single-blind review, so your reviewers stay anonymous while they can see who you are and, more to the point, your prior nano papers.

That asymmetry is load-bearing: a reviewer who knows your earlier work will spot an incremental advance dressed up as a new one, so the rebuttal has to establish the advance against the literature and against your own track record.

The defining bar is significance at the nanoscale, demonstrated through applications. Small's scope is nanotechnology and nanomaterials for applications, not pure nanoscience and not characterization for its own sake.

Reviewers assess four things in roughly this order: is the nanomaterial a genuine advance over what exists, is there a stated mechanism rather than an asserted one, is the performance benchmarked against the existing best material, and does the paper demonstrate application value rather than promise it. A rebuttal that answers all four moves the decision; a rebuttal that answers only "we characterized it more" does not.

A major revision at Small carries a specific meaning. It typically requires benchmarked performance and a stated mechanism, often a head-to-head comparison table or an additional application test, returned within the deadline in your decision letter. The journal reports first decisions in roughly 100 to 140 days, with desk rejection around 35 to 45 percent and acceptance around 15 to 25 percent, so the manuscripts that reach revision have already cleared a real filter.

In practice the editor evaluates whether your rebuttal closed the significance gap, not whether it sounds polite.

How this compares to the rest of the nano family matters for calibration. ACS Nano applies a heavier general-nanoscience novelty filter and wants a clean nanoscience story with solid mechanistic support across broad materials or device relevance. Advanced Functional Materials wants the functional performance or device to be the protagonist, so a reviewer there forgives a thinner nanoscience story if the function is striking.

Nano Letters is a short-format letters venue judged on a single high-impact result, so its rebuttals are terser and its reviewers less forgiving of scope sprawl. Small Methods, the methods-focused sister title in the same Wiley family, wants the technique to be the contribution. Small sits between these: broad nano- and microscale scope, an advance-plus-application bar, and a revision norm built on benchmarking.

Because a reviewer at Small is asking specifically whether your nanomaterial does something new and useful, the rebuttal has to hold both halves at once, which is not true at journals that weight one heavily over the other.

In our pre-submission review work with Small manuscripts, the rebuttals that stall in a second revision round share a small set of recurring weaknesses. These are the same ones nanomaterial reviewers flag at re-review, and each maps to a specific, named failure pattern in the Small editorial culture, testable against your own draft response before you upload it.

Answering the "what is the nanoscale advance" question with more characterization. This is the most common and most expensive pattern in our Small pre-submission reviews. A reviewer asks what the advance over existing nanomaterials is, and the rebuttal answers with additional TEM, XRD, or XPS panels. Across our Small rebuttal reviews, more characterization without a stated advance is the single strongest predictor of a third round.

The fix is a head-to-head benchmark table and one sentence in the Introduction naming the advance, not another figure of the same material from a new angle.

Adding data without an updated, honest benchmark. A rebuttal that runs the requested experiment but does not compare the result to the prior best material leaves the significance question open. In our pre-submission review work with Small manuscripts, responses that add a performance result without a benchmark, or that benchmark against a weak strawman rather than the genuine state of the art, consistently draw a re-review comment. Reviewers at Small know the field's best numbers; an inflated or absent comparison reads as evasion.

Over-claiming generality from a single system. Small wants application value, but a rebuttal that responds to a scope question by widening the claim ("our approach is broadly applicable to all nanomaterials") rather than demonstrating it triggers a sharper second round. In our Small pre-submission reviews, the rebuttals we flag here add a sweeping conclusion without the control or additional system that would support it. Demonstrate the application in one regime cleanly and bound the claim honestly; do not expand the abstract to outrun the data.

Scope drift toward a pure-chemistry or pure-device venue. When a reviewer questions mechanism, some rebuttals over-correct into a deep synthesis or pure-chemistry methods paper; when a reviewer questions application, others over-correct into a device-engineering paper. Either drift moves the manuscript out of Small's lane.

In our Small rebuttal reviews, scope drift is a quiet killer: the new data are fine, but the introduction and discussion now read as if the paper belongs at a chemistry or an engineering journal, and the editor notices. Keep the nano-application story central and answer the mechanism or application question inside that frame.

State the advance, benchmark it honestly, bound the claim, and stay in your lane. That four-part discipline is what separates a Small rebuttal that clears one revision round from one that stalls into a second or third. Check your Small point-by-point response for these patterns before you submit.

Source: Manusights pre-submission reviews of Small-targeted resubmissions, 2025 cohort.

Authors consistently underestimate the benchmark-and-mechanism effort and overestimate the writing effort. This breakdown is about workload, not the journal's decision clock; for the end-to-end decision schedule, see the Small review time guide.

Source: Manusights pre-submission reviews of Small resubmissions, 2025 cohort, last updated June 7, 2026.

A major-revision invitation at Small is not a soft acceptance. The revised manuscript and your point-by-point response go back to the original nanomaterial reviewers, and the paper can still end in rejection after re-review if the new data do not establish the advance. With acceptance around 15 to 25 percent and desk rejection around 35 to 45 percent, the journal does not rubber-stamp revisions.

Most rejections at this stage trace to one cause: the author answered a significance question with more characterization. The second most common is a benchmark that is absent, inflated, or set against a strawman rather than the genuine state of the art.

Think twice if these are true before you resubmit

• The response uses generic "we have addressed this" language with no page or line numbers.
• A reviewer asked what the advance is and you answered with more characterization panels.
• You added a performance result but no honest benchmark against the existing best material.
• The rebuttal widened the claim instead of demonstrating it, with a sweeping conclusion and no new control.
• The revision drifted toward a pure-chemistry mechanism paper or a pure-device engineering paper and now reads as out of Small's lane.

Fixing these before resubmission is what keeps a second round from becoming a rejection. The single highest-leverage move is to find the one significance concern behind the comments and close it with a benchmarked result, because that is the question every Small reviewer is really asking.

Wiley's guidelines tell you to submit a point-by-point response and to explain how the revised manuscript differs from the previous version.

They do not tell you that the decision turns on the nanoscale advance rather than characterization, that single-blind reviewers will weigh the revision against your own prior nano papers, that a major revision means a benchmark and a mechanism rather than more figures, or that scope drift toward chemistry or device engineering quietly moves your paper out of Small's lane. Those four facts change how you write every reply.

The patterns above come from our pre-submission reviews of Small-targeted rebuttals, and they are testable against your own draft today, not theoretical concerns.

• Manusights pre-submission reviews of Small-targeted manuscripts (2025 cohort)