Vis author response

VIS Author Response

Use this after IEEE VIS reviews are released. VIS has two distinct speaking turns, and conflating them is a common mistake: a first-round engagement with the reviewer discussion, and — if you receive a conditional accept — a full second-round revision with a summary of changes accompanying a revised paper that the original reviewers re-read against the required changes. This is a journal-style revise-and-review, not a one-shot CVPR rebuttal.

Triage (both turns)

• Answer what affects the decision: novelty, impact, whether the evidence supports the claims, methodology, encoding/interaction rationale, and reproducibility.
• Use evidence that already exists or that the revision will concretely add — never a vague promise to "consider" a study.
• Correct factual misreadings first; a reviewer who misread a figure or a task is often persuadable.
• If you submitted double-blind, keep every word anonymous through the first round — do not name your system, lab, grant, or a public repository even to strengthen a point.

Turn 1 — the first-round engagement

VIS's first phase includes a reviewer discussion. Your first-round comments (where the cycle allows author input before the decision) should be short and decision-focused: concede what is true, correct what is misread, and point to exactly where the answer already lives in the paper or the supplemental video/code. Do not smuggle in new results the reviewers cannot verify. The goal is to move the paper from "reject" toward "conditional accept" by removing correctable misunderstandings.

Turn 2 — the conditional-accept revision (the distinctive VIS move)

A conditional accept comes with a list of required changes. The revision is judged on whether you met them. The summary of changes is a change ledger: for every required change, either make it and show where, or justify declining it with a reason.

[R1.1] Required change (quoted briefly)
       -> Action: DONE  | added the within-subjects study (§6.2), Fig. 7, effect sizes + CIs
       -> Where: §6.2, Fig. 7; supplemental/analysis/study2.ipynb
[R2.1] Required change
       -> Action: DONE  | rewrote the encoding-rationale (§4.1) to tie each channel to a task
       -> Where: §4.1, Table 2
[R1.2] Required change
       -> Action: JUSTIFIED DECLINE | the requested 3D condition contradicts the task's
          occlusion constraint; added a scoping sentence + threat instead (§8)
[R3.1] Required change
       -> Action: PARTIAL | added the perceptual pilot; the full longitudinal deployment is
          out of scope for the revision window and is noted as future work (§9)

The rule that turns a conditional accept into an acceptance: no silent omissions. A required change that is neither made nor explicitly justified as declined is what the second read punishes.

Reviewer pushback patterns (visualization-specific)

Pushback	What it signals	VIS-ready response
"Why this encoding rather than a standard chart?"	Design-rationale gap	Add a task-to-channel justification; compare against the conventional baseline
"The evaluation does not match the contribution"	Method mismatch	Add the evidence the contribution type needs (study for a claim about people; benchmark for a technique)
"Is this better than [existing tool/technique]?"	Novelty/delta doubt	Add the comparison or a scoped delta sentence naming what is new
"The user study is underpowered / confounded"	Conclusion-validity objection	Report power/effect sizes; add participants or bound the claim
"The system/results are not reproducible"	Open-practices gap	Release anonymized code/data; describe the reproduction path and target the Replicability Stamp
"Color/perception choices are not accessible"	Perceptual-validity concern	Justify the palette (CVD-safe, luminance); cite the perceptual basis

Anonymity in the response (when submitted double-blind)

• Refer to your own prior work in the third person, as in the paper.
• Describe system/artifact changes without linking to an identity-revealing repository or demo; use the anonymized location until the paper is accepted.
• Do not thank a named collaborator or funder inside a first-round response.

Calibration

• Respond to the criterion the reviewer actually raised, not the one you would rather defend.
• The revised paper — not the summary of changes — carries the argument; the summary is a map from required change to edit.
• Length and format norms for both turns vary by cycle; confirm the current instructions and the second-round timeline before writing.

Output format

[Turn] first-round engagement / conditional-accept revision
[Priority issue] <reviewer concern>
[Decision dimension] novelty / impact / evidence / methodology / encoding rationale / reproducibility
[Change ledger] <required change -> DONE/PARTIAL/JUSTIFIED-DECLINE + where in paper/supplemental>
[Anonymity check] <if double-blind: no identity leak in the response: passed/issues>