I have just received a letter from a journal asking me to respond to reviewer comments. What does this mean and how do I do it?

Congratulations! Your paper has just been peer-reviewed by experts. These experts have gone through your manuscript and have suggested changes to the manuscript in the form of comments, which would significantly improve the quality of the final manuscript. The type of comments that you have received from the reviewer could range from simple grammatical errors to more drastic ones requesting for redesigning experiments and compiling new data. If your are a first time author, going through these comments may be quite overwhelming and you would have several questions regarding what the reviewers are actually looking for and how these questions can be addressed.  You would need to review these comments in detail and then decide on how to proceed with resolving each comment. You could use the following tips to understand and respond to your reviewer’s comments-

• Do not immediately sit to draft a reply or make changes to your manuscript. Take some time to reflect on their comments and understand what exactly they are looking for.
• Do not attempt to answer all the comments in one go. Answer them one at a time. Even with making changes to your manuscript-first take a call whether you agree to what the reviewer has to say and would make the changes or do you disagree with the reviewers suggestion and would like to draft a rebuttal for the same.
• Make sure you are polite while responding to the reviewer, thank them for their time and effort and make sure you put your points across in a detailed and clear manner. Give a point wise response for each issue that is mentioned. Give details of or highlight the changes that you have made.
• Do a thorough proofreading of both your response letter as well as the revised document and ensure that you have not missed out on addressing anything.