How do I indicate deleted text from a manuscript?

Question

I had a manuscript accepted with major revision. I have now revised it and will resubmit shortly. The editor requested that I highlight any changes in the text, which I have done in yellow. However, I have also simply removed certain parts of the manuscript. How do I indicate this?

The editor specifically stated that the results should be reduced to X pages and discussion to not exceed Y pages, so using strikeout feels inappropriate. Can I resubmit with track changes? Or is there a better way to indicate?

Answer 1

No one who is not on your editing team is likely to read the details.

However, you can be nice to your editors and offer multiple levels of detail:

1. the shortened manuscript
2. a list of essential changes (listing not every detail, only the important ones, possibly with rationale if relevant)
3. a file with the complete set of changes, e.g. latexdiff/MS Word tracking if it's not overloaded.

This gives the editors the choice of level of detail they seek.

Answer 2

You have to find a reasonable compromise between readability and making all changes transparent. Therefore, I would advise against using the track changes function in MS Word exclusively to present your revisions. You would primarily reduce readability to an unacceptable extent.

Usually, it is fine to explain in the letter that accompanies your revision which parts you removed without making this transparent in too much detail in your revised version. In my experience, this works very well. Especially of you basically rewrite/shorten large sections, it is enough to write something like "section XY was rewritten in order to stay below the limit of Z pages, as requested by the editor". Then you can highlight the new/revised text, and you are fine.

In some cases, journals also allow to upload a specific version only used for review that includes highlighting of the changes, in addition to a non-highlighted version. In such cases, it might be appropriate strike out parts of the text or even use the track changes function because the fully readable version is also available to the reviewers.

Answer 3

If I was you, I would use tracked changes for all the changes, and add yellow highlighting to all the changes.

And in case the editor views it with the changes visible and thinks you have not reduced the number of pages, explicitly tell them "I have reduced the results to X pages and the discussion to Y pages, as you can see by viewing the final version with no markup in Word."

You might want to add a "Microsoft Word" tag to your question, if that tag exists.