README.md
In pjbouchet/respondR: R Markdown Template for Responses to Reviewers

This package provides an Rmarkdown template for writing clear, professional-looking and consistently formatted responses to peer-review comments on scientific papers.

Responding to comments on a manuscript is an essential yet sometimes daunting part of the peer-review process, particularly as clear and well-crafted responses are often tedious to formulate but can go a long way towards ensuring acceptance. respondR was designed to take away some of that strain by providing a user-friendly RMarkdown template that can produce professional-looking and consistently formatted response documents — encouraging authors to focus on content rather than style.

In particular, respondR conforms to best practice rules for academic peer-reviewing Noble (2017), and facilitates the tasks of:

Providing an overview of edits (Rule 1).
Making the response self-contained (Rule 3).
Using typography to assist reviewers and editors in navigating the response (Rule 6).
Clearly identifying the changes made to the submitted draft (Rule 9).

The package and associated template can be installed using the following command:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("pjbouchet/respondR")

respondR is built around two core files:

A Microsoft Word (.docx) document housing the content of the response.
An RMarkdown document (and LaTeX backend) used for formatting.

The idea is to write up responses to reviewer comments in Word using the provided template, and subsequently generate a formatted PDF directly from within RStudio.

After installation, follow these simple steps:

Step 1: In RStudio, go to File > New File > R Markdown > From Template [Note: You may need to restart RStudio first].
Step 2: Select the Response to Reviewers template from the list and click OK. This will create an Rmd file, populated with a default template.
Step 3: Save the file to disk.
Step 4: Knit the document by going to File > Knit Document or clicking on the Knit icon in the top bar of the Rstudio editor and choosing Knit to response.
Step 5: Fill in the Microsoft Word table template (see the vignette).
Step 6: Knit the Rmd file.