On the flip side of writing a review is writing a rebuttal. Many conferences (such as CHI) have a two-round review process during which authors have a chance to communicate with the reviewers by writing a rebuttal after the first initial round of reviews. This is an opportunity for you to justify the importance of your work and address misinterpretations.

The purpose of the rebuttal is to convince reviewers (especially 1AC and 2AC) that the concerns they pointed out are minor and fixable within the conference review cycle. I recommend adopting the following steps, based on the guidelines and blogs written by D. Vogel, N. Elmqvist, and others.

Review analysis

1. Read the reviews thoroughly
   • Talk to your co-authors about the reviews.
   • Highlight the key concerns, arguments, and comments of each reviewer. Consider using color coding: e.g., red for serious/major concerns, yellow for less critical/minor concerns, and green for positive comments.
   • Pay special attention to the 1AC's meta-review: What are the major concerns? What are minor? What is explicitly required in the rebuttal?
2. Group comments by themes
   • Combine and consolidate related comments together into categories or themes.
   • Order the themes based on severity (from the most to the least).
   • 1AC's meta-review may provide a specific grouping and an order. Make sure to follow that and you may combine the points when necessary.
3. Write individual responses and action plans
   • For each point in a theme, write your initial response or actions to address the point.
   • Acknowledge that you missed something.
   • Correct misinterpretations and provide clarifications.
   • Provide specific minor revision plans and how you are going to fix each concern.
   • Refer to part of the paper that already talks about points.
   • Include additional analysis or evidence to back your claims.

Rebuttal writing

Usually, you are only given a week to write the rebuttal. So we need to be efficient. Within one or two days, you should complete the above Steps 1 and 2, as well as hold a meeting with your co-authors (including me) to discuss the rebuttal strategies. Within another two days, you should have an initial draft of the rebuttal, and send it to me for advice. We may need to hold another meeting to discuss the rebuttal, and we should have a polished rebuttal at least one day before the submission deadline. For ease of discussion, you should keep these files in a shared folder or a Google Doc with three tabs:

1. a document for the original reviews, with color-coded highlighted concerns;
2. a document for the grouped reviews, with themes and sub-themes, etc., as well as draft responses and action plans under each (sub-)theme;
3. a document for the rebuttal draft, with headers for themes and polished responses.

D. Vogel provides a more specific methodology of writing rebuttals and formatting strategies of organizing the documents (see this), which are useful to follow along.

Based on the above review analysis:

• Combine your responses under each theme into logical paragraphs. Consolidate them when necessary. It is important that you follow the same order above.
• Mind your language and be polite.
• Be factual and correct.
• Address specific reviewers by name: R1, R2, 1AC, ...
• If you propose to add a lot of content, also propose where to cut in the paper.