Address the reviewer's concerns directly by clarifying what makes your work novel and providing evidence to support your claims.
Understand the Specific Concern
First, carefully read the reviewer's comments to identify exactly what aspect of novelty they're questioning. Are they saying the problem has been solved before, the methods aren't new, or the contribution is incremental? Understanding their precise objection helps you craft a targeted response rather than a generic defense.
Strengthen Your Positioning
Go back to your related work section and ensure you've adequately differentiated your approach from existing research. Explicitly state what previous work did and what gap remains. Then clearly articulate how your work fills that gap—whether through a novel method, application to a new domain, improved results, or a different theoretical framework.
Provide Concrete Evidence
Support your novelty claims with specific comparisons. Create a table contrasting your approach with prior work across key dimensions like methodology, scope, performance metrics, or assumptions. Quantify improvements where possible. If your contribution is methodological, show how your technique differs algorithmically or conceptually from existing approaches.
Reframe the Contribution
Sometimes novelty exists but wasn't communicated effectively. Consider whether your contribution is methodological, empirical, theoretical, or practical. If reviewers missed your main innovation, rewrite your abstract and introduction to foreground it more clearly. Use explicit language like "Our key contribution is..." or "Unlike previous work which X, we Y."
Acknowledge and Contextualize
If the work is indeed incremental, don't oversell it. Acknowledge the evolutionary nature while emphasizing why this step matters for the field. Incremental advances that enable new applications, improve efficiency significantly, or provide crucial validation can still be valuable contributions.
Search for Supporting Evidence
Conduct a thorough literature search to verify that your specific combination of methods, application domain, or problem formulation hasn't been published. When searching for related work, use complex queries that exclude irrelevant results to find truly comparable studies. Document this search in your response to demonstrate due diligence.
Revise Strategically
Based on the reviewer's feedback, revise your manuscript to make the novelty unmistakable. Add a dedicated subsection on contributions, strengthen the positioning in the introduction, and ensure every claim of novelty is backed by citations showing what others did and didn't do.
