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Me and my supervisor were written a paper on medical imaging as a part of my master thesis, we sent a paper to a journal for publishing, after a period of time the journal send us back the paper with some comments from each reviewer. In our perspective a number of questions from reviewers comes from a word "Novel" that we wrongly put it in a title. And I want to ask you professionals that is it possible to change the title? is it a good or bad idea? this will make our paper to be refused by reviewers or not?

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    This is a very straightforward question for experienced researchers (though not obvious for new researchers). Wasn't your supervisor able to tell you that the answer is clearly "Yes"?
    – Tripartio
    Nov 18, 2019 at 6:40
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    In any case, well done on receiving a request for revision. That is a good sign because it means the editor thinks your article might be publishable. Best wishes on getting the revision accepted!
    – Tripartio
    Nov 18, 2019 at 6:43

2 Answers 2

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It's normal to change titles during the review process, sometimes reviewers even ask for it explicitly.

If it's causing a problem or confusion, change the title.

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    I wouldn't say it's "normal" (it's uncommon), but it's certainly not abnormal either.
    – Allure
    Nov 18, 2019 at 11:46
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    sometimes reviewers even ask for it explicitly --- I've actually done this. A few years ago I was reviewing a paper (what follows is made up; it was a pure mathematics paper) that I thought was a study for rivers in how much various aspects of the water flow near one side of the river can differ from the corresponding aspects of the water flow near the other side (this being based on the title and the abstract, both of which I provided suggested revisions), but in fact the paper was a study of these differences on the two sides of a line of fixed approach angle to a fixed side of the river. Nov 18, 2019 at 13:41
  • @Allure I guess it's maybe more common in my experience than yours. Probably >25%, <50%, which I would consider pretty normal. There are lots of opinions about titles (should they contain conclusions or studies? should they be specific or brief?) that come out in review processes. Journals in some fields are also quite picky themselves, especially in medicine.
    – Bryan Krause
    Nov 20, 2019 at 2:08
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I would say yes it's possible as I have just had a paper accepted where I changed the title during review. Now the change wasn't huge and the referee had commented on the title (and I'm not submitting to medical journals). Like most things in a refering process, if you can justify it and the referee(s) accept the change you can get away with alot. It might get more complicated if you posted the paper on a preprint server beforehand (only in the sense people might mistake it as two papers, depending on the level of "change")

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