letter to editor 回复编辑的信(SCI).doc

dear dr. xxx, thank you for arranging a timely review for our manuscript. we are pleased to know that our study is of general interest for the readers of nutrition. we have carefully evaluated the reviewers critical comments and thoughtful suggestions, responded to these suggestions point-by-point, and revised the manuscript accordingly. all changes made to the text are in red so that they may be easily identified. with regard to the reviewers comments and suggestions, we wish to reply as follows:enclosures:(1) correspondences to your reviewers;(2) one copy of the revised manuscript;(3) a floppy disk containing the revised manuscript.(4) copyright assignmentto reviewer#11. the author should add a few review articles on ghrelin for readers in the introduction.we added two reviews in our revised manuscript.2. the increase in ghrelin levels do not necessary indicate that weight loss in disease is well compensated (introduction and discussion). this may be interpreted to be insufficient to recover to the previous body weight.there is possibility that the increase in ghrelin levels may result from the insufficient to recover to the previous body weight, but it is more likely that the increase in ghrelin level indicate that weight loss in disease is well compensated. shimizu et al1 reported that baseline plasma ghrelin level was significantly higher in cachectic patients with lung cancer than in noncachectic patients and control subjects. as weight loss is a chronic process and ghrelin levels may change more rapid than weight loss, the increase in ghrelin in those chronic diseases is unlikely result from the insufficient to recover to the previous body weight. moreover, this author also reported that follow-up plasma ghrelin level increased in the presence of anorexia after chemotherapy, which further suggests that the increase ghrelin level may represent a compensatory mechanism under catabolicanabolic imbalance in cachectic patients with lung cancer1.3. the authors should refer to the original report that il-1b decrease plasma ghrelin levels(gastroentelorogy 120:337-345,2001) we referred this article as the reviewer suggested. in fact, this is a mistake of us. many thanks for the reviewers suggestion.4. ref. 13 dose not include data on ghrelin.we are so sorry to make this mistake for citing the ref.13. we replaced the reference in the paper.5. there is no report that desacyl ghrelin stimulates food intake. it is the consensus at present acyl ghrelin is involved in feeding response to starvation. therefore, the authors should be careful about their interpretation described in the last paragraph in page 10. we made it clear in the paper that ghrelin has two isoforms (“active” and “inactive”). only the “active” isoform is involved in feeding response to starvation. but the “inactive” isoform has other activities like anti-proliferative activity on tumor cell lines as described in the manuscript.to reviewer#2major comments1. earlier studies have shown that circulating ghrelin level is increased in underweight patients with chf, lung cancer, and liver cirrhosis. in the present study, however, plasma ghrelin level was decreased despite a significant weight loss in copd. in addition, earlier studies have reported that circulating ghrelin correlated positively with bmi in patients with chf and lung cancer. however, the present study demonstrated that plasma ghrelin level correlated positively with bmi in copd patients. thus, there are considerable discrepancies between the present study and earlier studies. these discrepancies should be discussed in detail. the author also stated the regulation of ghrelin secretion was disturbed in copd patients. however, they did not clarify this mechanism.we stated that the role of ghrelin in patients with copd may be different from its role in chf, cancer and liver cirrhosis and discussed this difference in the last paragraph of page 9. following the reviewers suggestion, we added that “plasma ghrelin correlated positively with percent predicted residual volume and residual volume/total lung capacity ratio” as the evidence for further supporting that respiratory abnormalities may take part in the regulation of plasma ghrelin levels.2. the authors demonstrated that plasma ghrelin level correlated negatively with plasma tnd-a and crp in copd patients. however, nagaya et al. have shown that plasma ghrelin level correlates positively with plasma tnf-a level in patients with chf. this discrepancy should be discussed. according to the reviewer indicated, we discussed this discrepancy in the second paragraph of page 9.3. the author stated that respiratory abnormalities may take part in the regulation of plasma ghrelin level in copd. the authors should describle the relationship between plasma ghrelin level and pulmonary function in copd. there are evidences that respiratory abnormalities may take part in the regulation of plasma ghrelin level in lung diseases with respiratory abnormalities2,3. as our study was designed to investigate whether the plasma ghrelin levels are increased or decreased in copd and whether the plasma ghrelin levels relates to the increased systemic inflammation in those patients, so we didnt analysis the relationship between plasma ghrelin level and pulmonary function. minor comments1. circulating ghrelin level exhibits a circadian rhythm. therefore, the authors should describle the limitation of their measurement of ghrelin in single samples. its true that circulating ghrelin level exhibits a circadian rhythm and to monitor the ghrelin levels in different time points is better than just measured a single sample. however, we collected the samples at the fasting state (from 9:00 p.m. on the previous night.) by venipuncture at 7:00 a.m. as most studies did2,4. so our results can exclude the possibility that the difference between groups was result from the circadian rhythm of ghrelin and are well compared with other studies. 2. in the results section, plasma ghrelin level in healthy controls was different with that in 0.25+0.22ng/ml, whereas, in figure 1a, it was approximately 1.8ng/ml. we fixed this in our revised manuscript. we are so sorry to make this mistake.to reviewer#31. about the paper of itoh et al in ajrcc. as the reviewer said, the study by itoh et al was not published when the current manuscript were submitted. we discussed the difference between the findings of their study and our study in revised manuscript.2. abstract conclusion: “plasma ghrelin decreased in copd”. this sounds like the authors have followed subjects for a long time and that the diagnosis copd was conformed, the plasma ghrelin decreased. this was however not the aim nor the case-a reformulation is necessary.we fixed this as the reviewer suggested in our revised manuscript.3. introduction(1) page 2. ref.1. is a letter to the editor in br j nutr and is a comment concering an earlier published paper. it is not a reference that support the statement. several other references exist in the literature to be used instead.thanks for the reviewers suggestion. we replaced this reference by other one.(2) page 2, line 5. “to understand weight loss mechanisms in this disease may be helpful to improve quality of life in these patients”. do you really think that if we researchers understand the mechanisms that automatically would make the patients happier? we replaced this sentence with “to understand weight loss mechanisms in this disease may be helpful to combat weight loss in these patients”4. methods(1) patients: how were the patient and control subjects selected?the authors state that none of the control subjects was taking and medications-was that also the case for the patients?that was also the case for the patients. in fact, most of the copd patients in china do not take any medications when the disease is clinically stable because of economic reason.page 4, line 2. a short description of ats criteria would be helpful for readers who are not familiar with those criteria.as those criteria are widely used by researcher and physicians, we did not describe them in our paper as some paper did. if you think it is necessary to do so, we may add a short description.page4, line3, what do you mean by “other diseases”? copd patients most often have a lot of other diseases.we are so sorry to mis-express this - we just means that those patients did not have the disease that known to affect the plasma ghrelin level. we fixed it in our revised manuscript. page 4, line 5. if i understand it correctly, none of the copd patients were smokers or ex-smokers, i.e. another reason exists for their copd. cigarette smoking is the main cause of copd, but here you have studied patients having other reasons for the disease. what dose this mean regarding the representativity of the study group?could it affect the results in some way? smoking increases the plasma ghrelin level5. it is difficult for us to define “ex-smokers” because there is no study about that whether the ex-smoking will affect the plasma ghrelin level or not. this may lead to the representativity problem. however, those patients in our study still lost the weight and had system inflammation as most copd patients did. further study should be designed to investigate the effect of ex-smoking on plasma ghrelin level.page 4, line 6.why do the authors refer to whatmore et al? that study investigated ghrelin in healthy adolescents and has nothing to do with factor known to affect serum ghrelin level.we are sorry to make this mistake. we replaced this reference. (2) body compositionpage 4, last line page 5, line1. the deuterium dilution study performed by baarends et al was using arm to foot bioelectrical impedance spectroscopy. in the current manuscript the foot to foot bioelectrical impedance assessment is used. the readers are lead to believe that the foot to foot bia is also validated with deuterium dilution in copd patients, which i think is not the case.thanks for the carefulness of the reviewer. however, there are still evidences that our method is well correlated with dexa6 and arm to foot bioelectrical impedance7, so it is appropriate to use this method in our study. however, because those sentences will lead to the confusion, we deleted them in revised manuscript according to suggestion of the reviewer. page 5, line 4. the %fat was calculated by the machine. it should be stated on which material these calculations are based on healthy subject? young or old? how many.according to the instruction of the manufactory, we selected the standard model for this calculation (the other model was athletic). we stated this in the revised manuscript.(3) statisticala reference by scols et al is used to strengthen the use of values below the detection limit and the use of log. other reasons need to be provided. what if schols et al did a statistical error using values that were below the detection limit? there do exist statistical reasonsfor log the values do they exist in this manuscript?its very important to select a suitable statistical method for process the data. there are 6 data below the detection limit in ghrelin and 1 data in leptin. if these data were discarded, it may increase the possibility of type two error as lower ghrelin levels were exclude. however, if the data were analyzed originally, it may increase the possibility of type one error as they below the detection limit. so it is reasonable to adopt the method used by schols et al. as to log transformation, we added the necessary information in the text according to the opinion of the reviewer. 5. discussionpage 8. line 2-3. copd patients had lower ghrelin levels compared to the control subjects. did the control subjects have “normal” ghrelin values?we selected seventeen age-matched healthy males as control subjects. those subjects were healthy. so we can take their ghrelin levels as “normal” ghrelin values. however, we think true “normal ghrelin values” should be based on large population study. page9. line 18. following “chf, cancer and liver cirrhosis” a reference is needed here.we added references as the reviewer suggested.page9. last line.ghrelin instead of gherlin.we fixed it.page 11. delete the summary, it is the same as the conclusion in the abstract.we wrote the summary according to the guideline for author of the journal. if you think the summary should be cut, we may delete it.6. reference as mentioned above, some of the references are not appropriate. they should be replaced by more appropriate and explanatory references.many thanks for the reviewers suggestion. we replaced those references in the revised manuscript.references:1.shimizu, y., nagaya, n., isobe, t., et al. increased plasma ghrelin level in lung cancer cachexia. clin cancer res 2003; 9: 7742.itoh, t., nagaya, n., yoshikawa, m., et al. elevated plasma ghrelin level in underweight patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. am j respir crit care med 2004; 3.haqq, a. m., stadler, d. d., jackson, r. h., et al. effects of growth hormone on pulmonary function, sleep quality, behavior, cognition, growth velocity, body composition, and resting energy expenditure in prader-willi syndrome. j clin endocrinol metab 2003; 88: 22064.nagaya, n., uematsu, m., kojima, m., et al. elevated circulating level of ghrelin in cachexia associated with chronic heart failure: relationships between ghrelin and anabolic/catabolic factors. circulation 2001; 104: 20345.fagerberg, b., hulten, l. m.,hulthe, j. plasma ghrelin, body fat, insulin resistance, and smoking in clinically healthy men: the atherosclerosis and insulin resistance study. metabolism 2003; 52: 14606.tyrrell, v. j., richards, g., hofman, p., et al. foot-to-foot bioelectrical impedance analysis: a valuable tool for the measurement of body composition in children. int j obes relat metab disord 2001; 25: 2737.nunez, c., gallagher, d., visser, m., et al. bioimpedance analysis: evaluation of leg-to-leg system based on pressure contact footpad electrodes. med sci sports exerc 1997; 29: 524一篇稿子从酝酿到成型历经艰辛，投出去之后又是漫长的等待，好容易收到编辑的回信，得到的往往又是审稿人不留情面的一顿狂批。这时候，如何有策略有技巧的回复审稿人就显得尤为重要。好的回复是文章被接收的重要砝码，而不恰当的回复轻则导致再次修改从而拖延发稿时间，重则导致文章被拒，前功尽弃。下面把我平时总结的一些答复审稿人的策略和写回复信的格式和技巧跟大家交流一下。首先，绝对服从编辑的意见。在审稿人给出各自的意见之后，编辑一般不会再提出自己的意见。但是，编辑一旦提出某些意见，就意味着他认为这是文章里的重大缺陷，至少是不合他的口味。这时，我们唯一能够做的只能是服从。因为毕竟是人家掌握着生杀予夺的大权。第二，永远不要跟审稿人争执。跟审稿人起争执是非常不明智的一件事情。审稿人意见如果正确那就不用说了，直接照办就是。如果不正确的话，也大可不必在回复中冷嘲热讽，心平气和的说明白就是了。大家都是青年人，血气方刚，被人拍了当然不爽，被人错拍了就更不爽了。尤其是一些名门正派里的弟子，看到一审结果是major而不是minor本来就已经很不爽了，难得抓住审稿人的尾巴，恨不得拖出来打死。有次审稿，一个审稿人给的意见是增加两篇参考文献（估计也就是审稿人自己的文章啦），结果作者在回复中写到，making a reference is not charity！看到之后我当时就笑喷了，可以想象审稿人得被噎成什么样。正如大家所想的那样，这篇稿子理所当然的被拒了，虽然后来经编辑调解改成了major revision，但毕竟耽误的是作者自己的时间不是？第三，合理掌握修改和argue的分寸。所谓修改就是对文章内容进行的修改和补充，所谓argue就是在回复信中对审稿人的答复。这其中大有文章可做，中心思想就是容易改的照改，不容易改的或者不想改的跟审稿人argue。对于语法、拼写错误、某些词汇的更换、对某些公式和图表做进一步解释等相对容易做到的修改，一定要一毫不差的根据审稿意见照做。而对于新意不足、创新性不够这类根本没法改的，还有诸如跟算法a，b，c，d做比较，补充大量实验等短时间内根本没法完成的任务，我们则要有理有据的argue。在argue的时候首先要肯定审稿人说的很对，他提出的方法也很好，但本文的重点是blablabla，跟他说的不是一回事。然后为了表示对审稿人的尊重，象征性的在文中加上一段这方面的discussion，这样既照顾到了审稿人的面子，编辑那也能交待的过去。第四，聪明的掌握修改时间。拿到审稿意见，如果是minor，意见只有寥寥数行，那当然会情不自禁的一蹴而就，一天甚至几小时搞定修改稿。这时候，问题在于要不要马上投回去了？我的意见是放一放，多看一看，两个星期之后再投出去。这样首先避免了由于大喜过望而没能及时检查出的小毛病，还不会让编辑觉得你是在敷衍他。如果结果是major，建议至少放一个月再投出去，显得比较郑重。上面是一些一般性的答复审稿人的策略，在实际中的应用还需要大家见仁见智。下面谈谈答复信的写法。写答复信的唯一目的是让编辑和审稿人一目了然的知道我们做了哪些修改。因此，所有的格式和写法都要围绕这一目的。一般来说可以把答复信分成三部分，即list of actions, responses to editor, responses to reviewers。第一部分list of actions的作用是简明扼要的列出所有修改的条目，让编辑和审稿人在第一时间对修改量有个概念，同时它还充当着修改目录的作用，详见下面的例子。剩下的两部分是分别对编辑和审稿人所做的答复，格式可以一样，按照“意见”“argue”（如果有的话）“修改”这样逐条进行。清楚醒目起见，可以用不同字体分别标出，比如“意见”用italic，“argue”正常字体，“修改”用bold。下面举例说明各部分的写法和格式sci 投稿全过程信件模板一览一、最初投稿cover letterdear editors:we would like to submit the enclosed manuscript entitled “paper title”, which we wish to be considered for publication in “journal name”. no conflict of interest exits in the submission of this manuscript, and manuscript is approved by all authors for publication. i would like to declare on behalf of my co-authors that the work described was original research that has not been published previously, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere, in whole or in part. all the authors listed have approved the manuscript that is enclosed.in this work, we evaluated (简要介绍一下论文的创新性). i hope this paper is suitable for “journal name”.the following is a list of possible reviewers for your consideration:1) name a e-mail: 2) name b e-mail: we deeply appreciate your consideration of our manuscript, and we look forward to receiving comments from the reviewers. if you have any queries, please dont hesitate to contact me at the address below.thank you and best regards.yours sincerely,corresponding author:name: e-mail: dear editor-in-chief,we submit our manuscript entitled “xxxxx” for possible publication in journal name.put abstract here!we certify that we have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the appropriateness of the collection, analysis, and interpretation of the data. all authors have reviewed the final version of the manuscript and approve it for publication. this manuscript has not been published in whole or in part nor is it being considered for publication elsewhere. none of the authors of this manuscript have a financial interest related to this work. thanks very much for your attention to our manuscriptbest regards,xxxxaddress xxxxxxxphonexxxxxxemail: xxxxxx二、催稿信dear prof. :sorry for disturbing you. i am not sure if it is the right time to contact you to