Peer review reports are the written evaluations provided by expert reviewers who assess a manuscript's strengths, weaknesses, and suitability for publication. If you’re like most interdisciplinary scholars, at some point in your career you’ll receive peer review reports that look something like this: one reviewer loves your piece and praises its theoretical sophistication, noting you bring a new and exciting perspective to their field. A second reviewer laments that the theory overwhelms your argument and you should significantly reduce the theory portions. A third reviewer asks for more engagement with a particular field, while the journal editor or acquisitions editor questions whether that field is relevant to your project at all.
These tensions are often a predictable result of interdisciplinary scholarship and are a common feature of interdisciplinary peer review. For many disciplinary projects, reviewers often disagree about degree or emphasis. For interdisciplinary projects, reviewers often disagree because they are evaluating the manuscript according to fundamentally different politics and norms around evidence, method, audience, and stakes.
Learning how to respond well to peer review is a critical skill for interdisciplinary scholars. Whether you’re working on a book or a journal article, navigating interdisciplinary peer review requires more than simply responding to individual comments. It requires understanding the intellectual frameworks that produced them so you can respond respectfully in ways that fit with your values and help you achieve your publication goals.
Identify the disciplinary logic behind the feedback
As acquisitions editors Elizabeth Ault (Duke University Press) and Shaun Vigil (Temple University Press) reminded everyone at our Navigating Peer Review on Your First Book event, it is most helpful to understand each peer review report as standing in for a group of readers, not just one person’s individual opinion. So before deciding whether to implement a recommendation from an interdisciplinary peer review report, ask: Why might this reviewer be making this request?
For example, a historian may prioritize archival depth, historical context, and periodization while a sociologist may prioritize methodological clarity, a specific kind of evidence, and your findings’ generalizability and a literary scholar may focus on close reading, textual interpretation, and theoretical contribution. If your project touches all three of these fields, part of your challenge as an interdisciplinary author is identifying how you can speak to their disciplinary norms (those shared expectations within a field about evidence, methodology, argumentation, and scholarly contribution) while also stretching beyond them to build the argument you want to make.
Many reviewer comments make more sense when viewed through the norms of a particular discipline. The goal is to identify the intellectual concern underlying the recommendation rather than treating every comment as a discrete revision request. For example, a request for more archival evidence may not literally mean "discuss more archival objects" or “go to another archive.” It may signal a concern about evidentiary depth more broadly, which could potentially be addressed in several ways.
This is one reason interdisciplinary authors often benefit from editorial support during revision. An interdisciplinary editorial team can help distinguish between disciplinary preferences and broader concerns that affect the manuscript as a whole.
Look for the shared concern beneath the disagreement
One of the most common challenges in interdisciplinary peer review is when two (or more) reviewers offer opposite recommendations while pointing toward the same problem. For example, the first reviewer advises that you expand your discussion of theory while the second reviewer advises that you reduce your theoretical discussion. These seem like directly opposite pieces of advice but they actually both identify the same issue: the role of theory in your argument is currently unclear. That is a clear and fixable problem that you’ll need to address to strengthen the article or book anyway.
At Ideas on Fire, we often review manuscripts together with their peer review reports as part of the developmental editing process. Doing so allows us to identify the concerns underlying reviewer recommendations and determine how those concerns might best be addressed through revision. One common example involves reviewers disagreeing about whether a manuscript needs more theoretical framing or less. In most cases, the underlying issue is not the amount of theory but rather how clearly the theory's role has been articulated throughout the project. This is particularly common in projects that span the humanities and social sciences, where reviewers often bring very different assumptions about what theory is and how it should function within scholarly research.
For another example, let’s say one reviewer thinks chapter 3 of your monograph should be cut because they think it distracts from your analysis while another reviewer recommends expanding chapter three and weaving its conclusions throughout the rest of the chapters as well. Cut vs. expand seems contradictory, but both reviewers here are noting that chapter 3’s role in the overarching book structure needs clarification, and they have actually given you two potential solutions to that single problem. You may of course choose a different solution altogether—perhaps breaking up chapter 3 and redistributing some material to other chapters to strengthen the through-line and narrative arc while adding new material to the remaining chapter 3 to better connect its conclusions to the book’s overarching argument.
Often, seemingly conflicting requests for more/less context or background, more/less engagement with literature, or a broader/narrower scope can point toward questions of audience, organization, or framing that need reconciliation. Conflicting recommendations often reveal places where the manuscript's goals need stronger articulation. Rather than just choosing which reviewer to follow based on which revision feels easier, pause first to look for patterns and underlying concerns. This allows you to make more informed revision choices that get at the root of what your reviewers have identified.
Decide which audiences the project ultimately serves
Divergent peer review reports can also reveal crucial questions about audience. By definition, interdisciplinary projects seek to speak to audiences beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and often beyond the academy itself. But no interdisciplinary project can satisfy every disciplinary expectation or audience desire equally. Eventually you must decide who this book or article is ultimately for.
Some questions to consider:
- Which scholarly conversations are most central to the book/article you want to write?
- Which readers are primary?
- Which readers are secondary or tertiary?
- What level of explanation is appropriate for those audiences?
For example, a scholar writing a book at the intersection of Latinx studies, sound studies, and digital humanities may decide that Latinx studies scholars are the primary audience, sound studies scholars are a secondary audience, and digital humanities scholars and practitioners are a tertiary audience. That decision can help guide which reviewer recommendations receive the most weight during revision. For tenure-track faculty, the primary audience will often be the field most closely aligned with their departmental home because that is typically the intellectual community within which the book's scholarly contribution will be assessed for tenure and promotion.
During developmental editing, we frequently help authors identify which audiences are primary and which are secondary before they begin major revisions. Once those priorities are established, reviewer recommendations become easier to evaluate because authors have a clearer framework for decision-making.
Some peer reviewer recommendations will align more closely with your project’s intended audience and contribution than others. I would advise considering those recommendations more deeply than ones that would take you further afield of your intended audience. Focus on the actual people you want to reach and the reviewer advice that can help you get there.
Interdisciplinary publishing always requires making strategic choices about what your project can and cannot do. Being able to articulate these choices in your response letter to the acquisitions editor or journal editor (more on this below) demonstrates that you have thoughtfully engaged with the peer review process rather than simply accepting or rejecting recommendations wholesale.
These decisions can be difficult to make alone, particularly when reviewer reports point in different directions. Developmental editors can help authors evaluate recommendations in relation to audience, contribution, and publication goals rather than treating every suggestion as equally important. Instead of asking "Which reviewer is right?" they help authors ask "Which revisions will best strengthen this project for its intended readers and publishing context?" This perspective can be especially valuable for interdisciplinary scholars navigating feedback from multiple disciplinary communities.
Explain your decisions clearly in the response letter
Acquisitions editors (for books) and journal editors (for journal articles) understand that authors cannot implement every recommendation in peer review reports. They don’t expect you to. But they do expect you to thoughtfully and generously engage with those recommendations, make conscious choices about your piece, and revise in ways that fit your goals while also aligning with their own production needs and editorial direction. Much of responding to peer review successfully involves explaining not only what you changed or didn’t but why.
The reviewer response letter is a key place where you demonstrate this. Sent to the acquisitions editor or journal editor, it explains how you engaged with the peer review reports, what revisions you made, and why. For a journal article, this letter is typically one or two pages long. For a book, it is often three or four pages—or even longer when reviewer feedback is extensive or substantial revisions are required.
When reviewing revised book manuscripts at Ideas on Fire, we often find that authors have done much more revision work than their original response letter drafts communicate. A thoughtful response letter helps editors and reviewers understand not only what changed but also why those changes strengthen the project.
Effective response letters acknowledge reviewer concerns, explain the revisions you’ve made, clarify where you took alternative approaches, and connect your decisions to the goals of the manuscript. Professionalism and tact are paramount here. This is not the place to rail against Reviewer 2’s ridiculous request to add three new chapters or their dismissal of your entire field. Nor is it the place to dig in your heels and insist your manuscript is already perfect. The entire point of peer review—indeed, why you are publishing with a press or journal that does it at all—is that you are seeking out deep engagement and critique from peers because you know it will make your project stronger and more effective.
Consider your language in how you explain your choices. For example, instead of “I chose not to make this change,” consider something like “I addressed Reviewer 1’s concern by clarifying X in chapters 2 and 4 while maintaining the broader interdisciplinary focus of the project.” The latter respectfully acknowledges the reviewer's concern, explains how you addressed it, and demonstrates that your decision was guided by the manuscript's broader goals rather than a simple acceptance or rejection of the recommendation.
It’s also important to understand that, particularly for book projects, you are not expected to implement every reviewer recommendation. While journal article revisions often include relatively straightforward changes—adding citations, clarifying a methodology section, or trimming an example or two—book revisions typically require a much deeper engagement with reviewer feedback. Acquisitions editors are not looking for blanket acceptance of every suggestion. Rather, they want to see that you have thoughtfully considered the reviewers’ concerns and made intentional decisions about how best to strengthen the project.
The response letter is a key opportunity to clearly articulate the book’s goals, intended audiences, and scholarly contributions. As you explain why you implemented some recommendations, adapted others, and declined others, you are also making the case for what kind of book this is (and is not) and what it is trying to accomplish. That work does not end with peer review. Throughout the publishing process—from manuscript revision to marketing copy, conference presentations, and author interviews—you will continue refining and communicating the book’s audience, intervention, and significance. A strong response letter demonstrates that you are not simply responding to peer review reports—you are actively shaping the intellectual identity of the book.
Interdisciplinary peer review is a conversation across fields
One of the key strengths of interdisciplinary scholarship is that it invites engagement from multiple intellectual communities within and beyond the academy. The interdisciplinary peer review process inherently reflects those communities' differing priorities, methods, desires, and assumptions.
Authors who learn to identify the concerns beneath reviewer comments, evaluate feedback in relation to their intended audience, and articulate their revision decisions clearly are better positioned to navigate interdisciplinary peer review successfully. Rather than treating conflicting reviewer reports as a problem to solve, you can approach them as an opportunity to sharpen your project's contribution, clarify its audience, and strengthen its impact within and across multiple fields.
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