Responding to reviewer’s comments with Ulysses and TaskPaper

There is plenty of serious and humorous advice on how to deal with reviewers’ comments to your manuscripts submitted to peer review journals. This post is about two apps: Ulysses and TaskPaper that make this job less tedious and frustrating for me.

At the first step, I paste all the comments into an Ulysses sheet as a plain text. Then I go through the comments and process them one by one. If I can respond immediately I mark the response with “>” which nicely separates it from the reviewers’ text. If I cannot respond immediately I mark the provisional response with “##TP”.

Screen Shot 2013-06-23 at 11.16.29 AM

Ulysses editing window with reviewers comments, drafts responses and the navigation window.

At the same time I add a task to TaskPaper to deal with that specific comment. I may tag it with @xx to indicate who of the co-authors is responsible and even insert the comment itself as a note to the task.

At the second step, I go through the TaskPaper actions and deal with those particularly sticky comments (or delegate these to the co-authors). When the comment has been addressed I cross it out from the TaskPaper, go back to Ulysses, find it through navigation (⌘8), remove the “##TP” mark and write a response in the same way as to other comments.

Review tasks 130618-2

Fragment of TaskPaper file with actions to respond to reviewers’ comments

Now all that is left to do is to export the responses to pdf from Ulysses and upload it to the journal’s site. Voila!

ROSE publication response to reviewers 130530.pdf (page 3 of 12)-1

Final text with responses to reviewers comments generated by Ulysses

Advertisement

About Aleh Cherp

Aleh Cherp is a professor at Central European University and Lund University. He researchers energy and environment and coordinates MESPOM, a Masters course operated by six Universities.
This entry was posted in Collaboration, Tasks, Workflows, Writing and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to Responding to reviewer’s comments with Ulysses and TaskPaper

  1. adrian says:

    Aleh, this is a very nice post. I’ve been using Ulysses for a long time and I do love Ulysses 2. It is the first time that I see that kind of integration between Ulysses and TaskPaper. Great!

    Like

  2. Pingback: Update on the Macademic Ninja kit | Academic workflows on Mac

  3. Pingback: When there is no time for OmniFocus: TaskPaper | Academic workflows on Mac

  4. Pingback: Ulysses III and TextExpander in teaching | Academic workflows on a Mac

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s