Paper Rebuttal Tip #12: Stop Just Promising—Provide Immediate Results

Problem

Reviewers often note that a paper lacks a critical experiment or analysis, making the current evidence insufficient to support the conclusions.

Ineffective reply

Simply stating “We will add it in the revised version” provides no persuasive power during the rebuttal phase.

What reviewers actually care about

Whether the supplementary experiment has been performed.

The experimental setup.

The core results.

Whether the new results uphold the original claim.

Whether the results fill the identified gaps.

Recommended reply

If time permits, include the new experiment or analysis results directly in the rebuttal.

Thank you for the valuable suggestion. We agree that this analysis is crucial for validating our method. Based on your feedback, we have added an experiment that partitions the test set by sample difficulty (easy, medium, hard) and compares our method with the strongest baselines. The results show a markedly larger improvement on hard samples, indicating that our method’s advantage persists in more challenging scenarios. We will incorporate these results into the revised manuscript and discuss the underlying reasons in the analysis section.

Three practical steps

State what was added: e.g., experiments split by task type, sample difficulty, model scale, or data size.

Provide key numbers or trends: e.g., “On difficult samples, our method outperforms the strongest baseline by X%,” or “The gain remains stable at larger model scales.”

Explain how the new results support the main claim: e.g., “These findings demonstrate that the advantage is not limited to easy cases but holds under challenging conditions.”

One‑sentence takeaway

Do not merely say “we will add it”; if possible, present the essential new results now, including the experimental setup, core metrics, and the conclusion they reinforce.

Project address

GitHub repository: https://github.com/MLNLP-World/Paper-Rebuttal-Tips