I am about to resubmit a project proposal for a postdoc grants. I am wondering whether I should submit a normal black & white text, as the original, or whether to highlight the new parts in-text. The proposal will be seen by past and new reviewers.
Do you think it is a good practice to inform the reviewers in-text about some changes reported in the revision report? If yes, how would you highlight the new additional elements? Is there a common practice?
Do you think it is a good practice to inform the reviewers in-text about some changes reported in the revision report? If yes, how would you highlight the new additional elements? Is there a common practice?
Yes, I definitely think you need to tell the reviewers what changed. Normally, in math, we prepare a separate document explaining the changes. As a referee, I have sometimes seen authors also highlight any new text in red, which does make it a lot easier for me to check the new stuff without having to re-read all the old stuff. As an author, I've done this, too, but sometimes my co-authors think it makes the whole thing messier. Plus, it's a lot of mucking around in the latex file.
My new favorite way to deal with this, both as an author and as a reviewer, is an online PDF comparison tool, like this one: https://www.draftable.com/compare
As a referee, when I receive the new version, I use such a software to compare it to the old version. As an author, I might consider mentioning the existence of such software in my "response to referee" document, if there were lots of changes, and I want the referee to be able to quickly check them without re-reading the whole paper, but also don't want the hassle of making text red only to later turn it black again.
This process holds both for publishing a paper in a journal, and for a back-and-forth over a grant or research proposal.
What is preferable or allowed might depend on the funder; for the US NIH, for example, no highlighting or similar is allowed in resubmissions.
I would start by checking policies of whoever you are asking for funds from, look carefully through any instructions or supporting documents that are available to you, and ask either grants staff at your institution or the funder themselves for how to proceed.
For a publication, changing the color might add another cycle, depending on the publisher and the format. And, even for a grant proposal, color may not be as effective as you might think, as some people are colorblind in various ways. It might even be irritating to some.
The old standard is to send a set of notes pointing to changes. For example, 6+3 means the third line on the sixth page should be looked at and 7-2 means the second line from the bottom on page 7. This is all that is really necessary. A sentence for each such notation will help. The same page-line scheme can be used for references to a reviewers comments. You might want to do this even if you use color in some way.
For large changes, pointing to pages may be enough, or even sections.
Some reviewers might not even need that, if they want to look again at the paper or proposal as a whole, rather than incrementally. An you should probably take that attitude as well, assuring that it holds together rather than seeming a bit "patchy".
