How can a paper be accepted by Physical Review Letters?

Question

In the first round, we get two reports from the Editor. Referee A just rejected it and referee B said that he is not sure.

Since referee A had made a mistake, we appealed to this manuscript. At the same time, we said that the report of Referee A should be ignored by the Editor since he/she said some ugly words beyond the academic.

The Editor sent our manuscript to B, C, and D.

As for C and D, they support our work. Reviewer B says that the current work is not sufficiently novel for a PRL. In my opinion, he just gives us 40 of 100. At the end of the report, Referee B said that some results are interesting.

In this case, what will happen? We did not reply to the Editor and referees in the second round yet.

For referee A, we more or less can guess his name. We believe the relationship between him and my Prof is not good. So..... — Blueka, Sep 29 '20 at 14:32
PRL is pretty selective. Not all papers will be accepted. It is up to the Editor handling your paper. — Jon Custer, Sep 29 '20 at 14:34
Does this answer your question? What does the typical workflow of a journal look like? — Louic, Sep 29 '20 at 21:24
@Louic In fact, no. My question is related to the experience to submit a very selective journal. — Blueka, Sep 30 '20 at 07:27
@Anton Menshov, this question is helpful to many students and Profs. — Blueka, Sep 30 '20 at 07:31
@Blueka not sure why you are directing that at me :) I did not even vote to close it. — Anton Menshov, Sep 30 '20 at 15:33

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 29 '20 at 14:58

The best you can do is to reply to the comments of the referees the best as you can and try to convince the editor that your paper is sufficiently novel for PRL. Try to answer very polite but on the other hand with some strong arguments. I would rather stay on the factual level about your paper and not start to discuss a relationship of referee A and your professor with editor.

But do not be disappointed if the editor will reject - the PRL is very selective. See the try as a possibility to improve your paper.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 29 '20 at 16:31

When I was a Ph.D. student (c. 20 years ago), there was a member of the PRL editorial team who used to tour universities giving talks on how to succeed in getting published in PRL. IIRC, his main thesis was that the chance of success is improved by giving the manuscript a "self-similar structure" whereby it made the same set of points three or four times in successively increasing levels of detail.

How can a paper be accepted by Physical Review Letters?

2 Answers2