Negotiating Publication: Author Responses to Peer Review of Medical Research Articles in Thoracic Surgery

Abstract

A variety of genres can be found within the genre cluster of journal article publication. Some of these genres are open to public view (e.g. the research article). Others such as peer review comments, however, are occluded or visible only to the authors themselves and tend to be under-researched. Although peer reviewer comments have been the focus of increasing research, little work has been done on author responses to reviewers (ARRs) and editor commentary. This paper presents an initial analysis of a corpus of author responses in thoracic surgery and attempts to highlight some key characteristics of these texts.