Wondering if you ever go back and look at the original draft to see how much the submitted R&R has changed? Particularly for qual work it seems like this would be necessary to evaluating how improved a paper is.
Editors/Reviewers, do you ever skim the initial draft after an R&R is submitted?
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Frankly, most of the time if the author memo is thorough I just skim the whole thing and let them have an accept. If the editor found it worthy of an R&R then I don't have the energy/interest in nitpicking them to death and finding a reason to reject.
For better or worse.
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The rare occasion where i would go back to the draft was in cases where I sense some sort of substantive discrepancy between the versions. Or once an author dropped a passage in the revision that I thought was actually quite good, so I went back to look for it and recommended they reintroduce it to the article.
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I don't read the submission draft again. I first re-read all the editor and reviewer comments from the first round, and then I read the response memo to see how they've addressed things, what changes they've made, and if they've tried to bury or ignore what I take to be important questions or comments from the first round that they cannot or do not want to deal with (this happens sometimes).
Then I skim the revised paper to see if it matches up with the claims in the response memo (sometimes it doesn't do all that's claimed in the response memo (the response memo is just a lot of hand-waving) and sometimes it does much more than the response memo (the author doesn't know how to write a good response memo).
The takeaway here is that, at least for me, the response memo is what I'm mostly evaluating, and the revised paper is almost like a supporting document for the response memo (you have to go back through it though because sometimes the revisions are much more impressive and effective than what the response memo makes them out to be).
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I'm like c234. I can usually tell from the response letter whether they've addressed my comments. That and skimming the revised version shows whether the revisions were sufficient. I also think through how well they addressed the other reviewers' comments.
I don't see any reason to just compare the old one to the new one. If they could address my concerns sufficiently without making a lot of overall changes, that's actually a good thing. If that wouldn't have been possible, they probably would have been rejected to begin with.