Research tips

Rob J Hyndman: Research tips

Posts tagged writing

More StackExchange sites

17Jul 2010

Posted by Rob J Hyndman in Uncategorized | No Comments

The Stack­Ex­change site on Sta­tis­ti­cal Analy­sis is about to go into pri­vate beta test­ing. This is your last chance to com­mit if you want to be part of the pri­vate beta test­ing. Don’t worry if you miss out — it will only be a week before it is then open to the public.

There is also a Stack­Ex­change site pro­posal for TeX, LaTeX and friends. Pre­sum­ably that means that most of the LaTeX ques­tions on Stack­Over­flow will then move to this new site. It still needs a cou­ple of hun­dred more peo­ple to com­mit before it can be launched, so if you are inter­ested in LaTeX, please com­mit to being part of it.

Another site pro­posal that may be of inter­est to read­ers of this blog is the one on Eng­lish lan­guage usage.

A few pro­pos­als are already open to the pub­lic for beta test­ing. One that I’ve been using a lit­tle is Web Apps which is use­ful for ques­tions on Gmail, Google reader, Word­Press, etc.

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The falling standard of English in research

15Jul 2010

Posted by Rob J Hyndman in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

It seems that most jour­nals no longer do any seri­ous copy-editing, and the stan­dard of Eng­lish is falling. Today I was read­ing an arti­cle from the Euro­pean Jour­nal of Oper­a­tional Research, which is a sup­pos­edly a good OR jour­nal (cur­rent impact fac­tor over 2). Take this for an exam­ple from the first page of this paper:

If the learned pat­terns are unsta­ble, the learn­ing tools would pro­duce incon­sis­tent con­cepts. To over­come this dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion, we employed arti­fi­cial neural net­works (ANNs, NNs) for help­ing the learn­ing task. NNs have attracted a lot of atten­tion form aca­d­e­mic researchers and indus­trial prac­ti­tion­ers because of the pow­er­ful flex­i­ble non­lin­ear mod­el­ing capa­bil­ity ([Balestrassi et al., 2009], [Bellini and Figa-Talamanca, 2005] and [Qi and Zhang, 2001]). It is the main rea­son for their pop­u­lar­ity that the data dri­ven tools have less restric­tion when applying. Learning tools with the sta­ble train­ing base usu­ally have reli­able performances.

The paper con­tin­ues in this vein for ten pages, cul­mi­nat­ing in an equally remark­able conclusion:

With the sam­ple size grow­ing, the shadow set con­tains a large num­ber of func­tional, vir­tual data, instead of whole real data. It would pos­sess less pop­u­la­tion rep­re­sen­ta­tion then. Before estab­lish­ing the the­o­ret­i­cal basis, we used the trial-and-error way for the expe­di­ent expla­na­tion and con­cluded that the vir­tual data size should be 10 at most in this case.

How did that get passed the asso­ciate edi­tor, edi­tor, copy-editor and type­set­ter? Did every­one really think it was ok, or did the paper get pub­lished with­out any of them actu­ally read­ing it prop­erly? It sounds like some­thing out of an auto­matic trans­la­tion pro­gram such as Google trans­late, although I sus­pect that Google trans­late may do rather better.

The des­per­ate rush to pub­lish as much and as often as pos­si­ble has led to a del­uge of badly expressed sen­tences, cob­bled together to look like an arti­cle, but often express­ing lit­tle of value.

Of course, one of the rea­sons for the rise of barely read­able Eng­lish is the increas­ing num­ber of papers writ­ten by researchers whose first lan­guage is not Eng­lish. I feel for them—I couldn’t write a sin­gle sen­tence in any other lan­guage. How­ever, there are ser­vices avail­able to help. In fact, in the sub­mis­sion guide­lines for Else­vier jour­nals, authors are advised to visit www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorshome.authors/languagepolishing if they need assistance.

For authors who can’t afford to use such ser­vices, and even for authors whose Eng­lish is pass­able, jour­nals need copy-editors. Unfor­tu­nately, it seems the prob­lem is often the poor qual­ity of the work done by copy-editors employed by the jour­nal publishers.

One of the first things I did when I took over as Editor-in-Chief at the Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Fore­cast­ing was replace the copy-editing team employed by Else­vier (the same group respon­si­ble for the above para­graphs) and install my own copy-editor who can at least rec­og­nize bad Eng­lish when she sees it. Fur­ther­more, I con­vinced Else­vier that they should pay for her. As a result, I think our pub­lished papers are now of a much higher qual­ity than they were a few years ago. Hope­fully that means they are read more, cited more and have greater impact. I wish other jour­nals would do the same.

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Should you make your working papers public?

9Jun 2010

Posted by Rob J Hyndman in Research tips | 2 Comments

There seems to be two points of view on this with dif­fer­ent prac­tices in dif­fer­ent disciplines.

  1. Some researchers do not make their work pub­lic until after it has been accepted for pub­li­ca­tion in a jour­nal. Until that time, drafts of papers are only cir­cu­lated to close con­fi­dants and usu­ally marked “Do not distribute”.
  2. Work­ing papers are pub­lished on web sites and in web repos­i­to­ries (such as arXiv or RePEc) as soon as they are fin­ished, at about the same time they are sub­mit­ted to a journal.

Because I work with peo­ple in lots of dif­fer­ent fields, I come across both of these prac­tices. In the first sit­u­a­tion, I don’t post the work­ing paper on my web­site until all coau­thors agree, which is not until the paper is accepted at a jour­nal. In the sec­ond sit­u­a­tion, I post the work­ing paper on my web­site (and usu­ally also on RePEc) as soon as possible.

I don’t like the secrecy model at all, but it is hard to con­vince coau­thors who have been trained under that process to change. Different jus­ti­fi­ca­tions are given for keep­ing things secret, depend­ing on who I ask. Here are some of them (in bold) with my thoughts on why the stated rea­sons make lit­tle sense.

  1. It pre­vents rival research groups know­ing what you are up to, and so allows you to stay one step ahead of every­one else. Of course, if every­one does this, then it is just as likely that your rival researchers are ahead already in ways you don’t know about. The result is that there is slower progress because there is not a free flow of infor­ma­tion between research groups. Also, since you don’t know what every­one else is doing, you are more likely to miss some­thing impor­tant that some­one else is work­ing on and waste a lot of time in the process. The most effi­cient pro­ce­dure is for infor­ma­tion to be shared as quickly and com­pletely as pos­si­ble. Yes, that helps your rivals, but it also helps you, and it helps progress in research.
  2. It pre­vents other researchers steal­ing your ideas before they are pub­lished. Pre­sum­ably the fear is that the work­ing paper will be leaked and some­one will copy the ideas and pub­lish it under their own name. There is a sim­ple solu­tion to this: pub­lish the work­ing paper under your own name with a date on it, prefer­ably in a pub­lic repos­i­tory. Then there is no motive for steal­ing the idea because it will eas­ily be shown that you did it first. Keep­ing work­ing papers secret makes it more likely that some­one will steal your ideas, not less likely.
  3. The work­ing paper may change sub­stan­tially before pub­li­ca­tion. That is true, but so what? Every­one knows that a work­ing paper is sub­ject to revi­sion before pub­li­ca­tion. It should be seen as an advance draft to sig­nal to every­one what you have done, and to enable them to start cit­ing it. There is the prob­lem of embar­rass­ing mis­takes being made pub­lic. Wait­ing until a jour­nal accepts the paper reduces the like­li­hood of embar­rass­ing mis­takes, but it doesn’t remove it entirely. Every­one who has pub­lished more than a hand­ful of papers will have writ­ten papers that con­tain errors, even with the ref­er­ee­ing process. If you are wor­ried about never mak­ing a pub­lic mis­take, you prob­a­bly shouldn’t be involved in research.
  4. Hav­ing a pub­lished work­ing paper may be against the jour­nal rules. I don’t know of any jour­nal that won’t pub­lish a paper if it has appeared in work­ing paper form. Most jour­nals not only explic­itly allow it, but also allow the work­ing paper to con­tinue to appear online even after the paper has appeared in a journal.
  5. The ref­er­ees will know who wrote it. This is true. A ref­eree can use Google to dis­cover the authors of a pub­lished work­ing paper. But does that really mat­ter? The blind ref­er­ee­ing model is based on the assump­tion that ref­er­ees will give bet­ter assess­ments if they don’t know who the authors are. I’m not sure that is true, and I haven’t seen any empir­i­cal evi­dence to sup­port it. Any­way, I don’t care if the ref­er­ees know that I am the author of the papers they are reviewing.

On the other hand, there are good rea­sons to have your work­ing papers dis­trib­uted widely and early.

  1. It increases your cita­tions. The more widely the paper is dis­trib­uted the more likely peo­ple are to cite it. Fur­ther, pub­lic repos­i­to­ries such as arXiv and RePEc are free, so a lot more peo­ple have access to the papers stored there then the papers pub­lished in the jour­nals which require expen­sive sub­scrip­tions. If the paper is only being pub­lished (and made pub­lic) a cou­ple of years after the ideas have been devel­oped, it is likely that research has moved on and your paper is not so rel­e­vant and there­fore not so citable.
  2. It pre­vents other researchers steal­ing your ideas because the ideas are dated and doc­u­mented ear­lier, as explained above.
  3. It allows feed­back from a wider range of peo­ple. I get email from a lot of peo­ple who read my work­ing papers, and some of them have some use­ful com­ments that can lead to improve­ments in the paper. It would be too late if these com­ments were received after it was published.

Part of the rea­son for this post is to con­vince my coau­thors that the secrecy prac­tice is a bad idea, even if every­one does it in your field. The only way to change the sit­u­a­tion is to start pub­lish­ing work­ing papers, and try­ing to con­vince every­one else to do the same. I hope this post will help that happen.

Feel free to com­ment if you agree or dis­agree. I’m espe­cially inter­ested in any other rea­sons peo­ple have for and against pub­lish­ing work­ing papers.

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Online collaborative writing

25May 2010

Posted by Rob J Hyndman in Research tips | 4 Comments

Every­one who has writ­ten a paper with another author will know it can be tricky mak­ing sure you don’t end up with two ver­sions that need to be merged. The good news is that the days of send­ing updated drafts by email back­wards and for­wards is finally over (hav­ing lasted all of 20 years — I can barely imag­ine writ­ing papers before email).

Non-LaTeX solu­tions

If you are will­ing to forgo the ben­e­fits of LaTeX, there are a few solu­tions available:

  • Google Docs. This is my favourite non-LaTeX solu­tion, partly because it inte­grates seam­lessly with other Google prod­ucts and also because you know there are a lot of smart peo­ple work­ing at mak­ing the prod­uct even bet­ter. It is easy to save the doc­u­ment as a pdf or in MS-Word for­mat when it is fin­ished. I use it reg­u­larly for short notes and non-mathematical documents.
  • Zoho offers a large and mature suite of prod­ucts for online col­lab­o­ra­tion includ­ing online writ­ing.  I’ve never used it, but the reviews sug­gest it is an excel­lent alter­na­tive to Google Docs.
  • Microsoft Docs is the lat­est player in this space. Cur­rently you must sign on with a Face­book account and you can only col­lab­o­rate with Face­book friends. That seems a lit­tle odd, as many peo­ple (includ­ing me) tend to keep our work col­leagues and our face­book friends as dis­tinct groups with lit­tle if any over­lap. MS Docs is built using Microsoft Office 2010, so pre­sum­ably it has more facil­i­ties than Google docs. On the other hand, as a new prod­uct it prob­a­bly has a lot more bugs as well.
  • Doc­Verse. This is a plug-in for Microsoft Office which allows sev­eral peo­ple to work on the same doc­u­ment and even dis­cuss the doc­u­ment via a chat panel. Not being very fond of MS-Office, I haven’t tried it.

LaTeX solu­tions

I’ve been watch­ing the var­i­ous online LaTeX tools for the past year as they have devel­oped. Finally, one of them appears to now be usable for real col­lab­o­ra­tive writ­ing. I am cur­rently using Scrib­TeX to write a paper with two coau­thors. There is no need for any of us to have a local LaTeX instal­la­tion (although we all do).  One author must set up a “project” for the paper which con­tains any graph­ics, bib files, local sty files and one or more tex files. Then start work edit­ing the tex files online. Just click “Com­pile” to process the file and the pdf ver­sion appears in another win­dow. The file is saved online so every­one has access to exactly the same ver­sion.  If you use any pack­ages from CTAN, they will be included auto­mat­i­cally. Here is the win­dow (in a browser) show­ing the paper I am cur­rently work­ing on.

Other authors can be invited to join the project pro­vided they have first reg­is­tered on Scrib­TeX (which is free). Then all authors will be edit­ing the up-to-date ver­sion. It is easy to roll back to an ear­lier ver­sion and it is pos­si­ble to see who mod­i­fied what. The free account allows up to three projects with one col­lab­o­ra­tor (i.e., two authors) per project. For $6 per month you are allowed 10 projects with up to six authors on each. For $10 per month, there are no lim­its (other than 1Gb of storage).

There are a few other sim­i­lar solu­tions in development:

  • LaTeX Labs. This is in the early stages of devel­op­ment, but has the cool fea­ture that the doc­u­ments are stored on Google Docs so there is vir­tu­ally unlim­ited stor­age. It is still miss­ing a lot of fea­tures, but shows promise.
  • Ver­bo­sus. This is a lit­tle harder to use than Scrib­TeX and does not come with all CTAN pack­ages pre-installed. But it has a nice text edi­tor and project man­age­ment interface.
  • Mon­key­TeX is also try­ing to solve the same prob­lem. It’s inter­face is a lit­tle more prim­i­tive than the oth­ers, but there are nearly 6000 users and 12000 doc­u­ments stored, so it can’t be too bad. There is appar­ently a screen­cast to intro­duce its fea­tures, but it wouldn’t dis­play in Chrome so I didn’t look further.

None of these three seem ready for reg­u­lar use yet, but I can rec­om­mend Scrib­TeX. Please try it out and let me know (via com­ments) how you get on.

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Using personal pronouns in research writing

15Oct 2009

Posted by Rob J Hyndman in Research tips | 4 Comments

Should you use “I” or “we” or nei­ther in your the­sis or paper?

Thoughts on this have changed over the years. Tra­di­tion­ally, using per­sonal pro­nouns like “I” and “we” was frowned on. Instead of say­ing “In Sec­tion 3, I have com­pared the results from method X with those of method Y”, you were expected to write “In sec­tion 3, the results from method X are com­pared with those from method Y”. This is known as writ­ing in the “pas­sive voice”, and for many years it has been con­sid­ered the “aca­d­e­mic” way of doing things. I think it is favoured because of the tone of detach­ment and imper­son­al­ity that it helps establish.

Some­times the pas­sive voice is awk­ward. For example

In study­ing ARIMA mod­els, the effect of the esti­ma­tion method on fore­cast accu­racy was explored.

This is eas­ier to express using “I”:

In study­ing ARIMA mod­els, I explored the effect of the esti­ma­tion method on fore­cast accuracy.

In my expo­nen­tial smooth­ing mono­graph, one of the coau­thors pre­ferred to write every­thing in the pas­sive voice, which led to some rather awk­ward phras­ing. (I edited all chap­ters to con­sis­tently use “we” before it went to print.)

There are still some jour­nals and research super­vi­sors who insist that research writ­ing must be in the pas­sive voice. How­ever, the sit­u­a­tion is slowly chang­ing and now many jour­nals accept, or even encour­age, the use of per­sonal pro­nouns. The Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Fore­cast­ing which I edit allows authors to use whichever approach they prefer.

A related issue for research stu­dents writ­ing a the­sis is whether to use “I” or “we”, espe­cially when the mate­r­ial has pre­vi­ously appeared in a co-authored paper. In gen­eral, I pre­fer stu­dents to use “I” when they mean the author, as it is their the­sis. (The royal “we” should only be used by mon­archs.) How­ever, it is very impor­tant to include a state­ment at the front of the the­sis clar­i­fy­ing the role of co-authors involved with any parts of the the­sis. If a chap­ter is essen­tially a co-authored paper, many uni­ver­si­ties require a signed state­ment from all authors.

One area where “we” is use­ful is in refer­ring to the reader and author together. For example,

In the fol­low­ing the­o­rem, we see that …

This is par­tic­u­larly com­mon in mathematics.

In sum­mary:

  • Write in the most nat­ural way. It is ok if that means using “I”.
  • Use “we” if you mean “the reader and I”, or if you are writ­ing a coau­thored paper.
  • Don’t use “we” if you only mean yourself.
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Squeezing space with LaTeX

14Oct 2009

Posted by Rob J Hyndman in Research tips | 9 Comments

I’ve been writ­ing a grant appli­ca­tion with a 10-page limit, and as usual it is dif­fi­cult to squeeze every­thing in. No, I can’t just change the font as it has to be 12 point with at least 2 cm mar­gins on an A4 page. For­tu­nately, LaTeX is packed full of pow­er­ful fea­tures that help in squeez­ing it all in. Here are some of the tips I’ve used over the years.

Make your text block as big as pos­si­ble. The sim­plest way to do that is using the geom­e­try package:

\usepackage[text={16cm,24cm}]{geometry}

Use a com­pact font such as Times Roman:

\usepackage{mathptmx}

Remove the spac­ing between para­graphs and have a small para­graph indentation

\setlength{\parskip}{0cm}
\setlength{\parindent}{1em}

Remove space around sec­tion headings.

\usepackage[compact]{titlesec}
\titlespacing{\section}{0pt}{2ex}{1ex}
\titlespacing{\subsection}{0pt}{1ex}{0ex}
\titlespacing{\subsubsection}{0pt}{0.5ex}{0ex}

Beware of enu­mer­ated and item­ized lists. Instead, replace them with com­pact lists.

\usepackage{paralist}
\begin{compactitem}
\item ...
\end{compactitem}
\begin{compactenum}
\item ...
\end{compactenum}

If you are allowed, switch­ing to dou­ble col­umn can save heaps of space.

\usepackage{multicols}
\begin{multicols}{2}
...
\end{multicols}

If the rules say 12pt, you can usu­ally get away with 11.5pt with­out any­one noticing:

\begin{document}\fontsize{11.5}{14}\rm

When you get des­per­ate, you can squeeze the inter-line spac­ing using

\linespread{0.9}

There is also a savetrees pack­age which does a lot of squeez­ing, but the results don’t always look nice, so it is bet­ter to try one or more of the above tricks instead.

A few more tricks are explained here and here.

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Writing an abstract

27Sep 2009

Posted by Rob J Hyndman in Research tips | 1 Comment

The abstract is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant part of a paper. Many read­ers will not read any­thing else, so you need to grab their atten­tion and get your main mes­sage across as clearly and suc­cinctly as pos­si­ble. It is not meant to be an intro­duc­tion to the paper, but a sum­mary of the paper. In a sin­gle para­graph, a reader can learn the pur­pose of the research, your gen­eral approach to the prob­lem, your main results, and the most impor­tant con­clu­sions. Write as if you have one minute to explain the paper to an inter­ested col­league, assum­ing that she will not read the paper her­self. Read the rest of this entry »

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Writing mathematics

18Sep 2009

Posted by Rob J Hyndman in Research tips | No Comments

Math­e­mat­ics has its own par­tic­u­lar con­ven­tions and rules when it comes to writ­ing. There have been sev­eral attempts to write them down. The most famous is Halmos’s excel­lent essay “How to write math­e­mat­ics”. Other good sources of advice are the fol­low­ing two books:

(I reviewed these two books in the Aus­tralian and New Zealand Jour­nal of Sta­tis­tics a few years ago.)

But if you just want a quick sum­mary, I rec­om­mend Dave Richeson’s blog entry “The nuts and bolts of writ­ing math­e­mat­ics”.

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Sight what you cite

13Aug 2009

Posted by Rob J Hyndman in Research tips | 1 Comment

There seems to be a wide­spread prac­tice of researchers cit­ing papers they have never even seen, let alone read. For example

  • Some papers claim to do some­thing new when it has already been done in one of the papers cited.
  • Some arti­cles are cited that appar­ently have lit­tle to do with the rea­son given for the cita­tion, or which argue the oppo­site point of view to what is claimed.
  • A paper uses method X and cites an arti­cle which points out a flaw in method X, with no com­ment on why the flaw can be ignored.
  • Ref­er­ence details are so full of errors that the paper can never have been sighted.
  • Some mis-spellings of an author’s names are per­pet­u­ated through long series of copied cita­tions with no-one ever check­ing the details. I fre­quently cor­rect the list of ref­er­ences in papers to appear in the Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Fore­cast­ing, but only where I notice an error, or where it looks sus­pi­cous. I haven’t time to check them all; besides, that’s the author’s job.

William Web­ber points out that there are cited papers that have never even been writ­ten! One famous paper has 215 cita­tions on Google scholar despite the fact that it doesn’t exist. And at least one of those cita­tions is by the author of the non-existent paper!

How can this hap­pen? It is sim­ply sloppy, lazy, and unac­cept­able. Here are a few com­ments that I regard as the bare min­i­mum for respon­si­ble scholarship.

  1. Every arti­cle cited should be sighted, and prefer­ably read.
  2. At the very least, check that the arti­cle cited really does say what you think it says.
  3. Type the ref­er­ence infor­ma­tion your­self from the orig­i­nal source, not copied from some­one else’s citation.
  4. Don’t just cite what other peo­ple say about cita­tions. For exam­ple, “Paper 1 says x about Paper 2″. Unless you have read both Paper 1 and Paper 2, and you have some­thing to say about the state­ment x in Paper 1, there is no point sim­ply repeat­ing it. It makes you look lazy and inca­pable of form­ing your own opin­ion. If Paper 1 is incor­rect, then you look stu­pid as well.
  5. Avoid lists of gra­tu­itous ref­er­ences. For exam­ple, “There has been a lot of recent work (e.g., a, b, c, d, e, f, g) on this topic.”  Instead, cite the rel­e­vant back­ground lit­er­a­ture, and make com­ments about how each cited paper fits in with what your paper is about. Just list­ing papers for the sake of extend­ing your own bib­li­og­ra­phy is rather pointless.
  6. Before you sub­mit your paper, go through the bib­li­og­ra­phy and check the details one more time.
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Writing responses to referee reports

3Aug 2009

Posted by Rob J Hyndman in Research tips | 1 Comment

I’ve been spend­ing time writ­ing response let­ters lately. I’ve also been read­ing lots of response let­ters from authors want­ing their stuff pub­lished in the Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Fore­cast­ing. I thought it might be use­ful to col­late a few thoughts on the subject.

  • No grov­el­ling. I some­times get response let­ters that start off with a para­graph of inane and obse­quious fawn­ing. The real response only begins after a para­graph of flat­tery which makes me won­der why I’ve never won the Nobel prize. Authors please note: it doesn’t work. I don’t decide whether to pub­lish your paper on the basis of how many nice things you can say about me. In fact, the more ridicu­lous the state­ments, the more I sus­pect that there must be prob­lems with your paper. Just begin with some­thing like this: “Thank you for the oppor­tu­nity to revise my paper. I have com­mented below on each of the points raised by the referees.“
  • Please respond to all of the major points made by the ref­er­ees. Just say­ing “We have done what the ref­er­ees asked” is insuf­fi­cient. The edi­tor wants to know what you have done. The sim­plest pro­ce­dure is to cut and paste the ref­er­ees com­ments into your response let­ter, with your com­ments inter­spersed. Use a dif­fer­ent font to make it clear what is from the ref­eree reports and what is your com­ment. That way the edi­tor does not need to switch between the ref­eree reports and your letter.
  • Give page and para­graph num­bers for all the changes you have made. An edi­tor will want to check pre­cisely what you have changed, and this makes it faster to do so.
  • For minor cor­rec­tions such as typos or gram­mat­i­cal issues, you can sim­ply say “I have cor­rected all of the minor errors noted by the ref­er­ees”. If the ref­eree has num­bered his/her com­ments, then give the num­bers to make it clear which cor­rec­tions you are refer­ring to.
  • If you dis­agree with the ref­eree, don’t feel obliged to do what is asked. But you do need to con­vince the edi­tor that the ref­eree is incor­rect. Explain your­self care­fully and respect­fully, and any rea­son­able edi­tor will weigh up your com­ments against those of the ref­eree. Remem­ber that the ref­er­ees have been invited to com­ment because they are con­sid­ered experts in the field. So you can’t just dis­miss them as idiots. If appro­pri­ate, you might say “I am pre­pared to do as the ref­eree requests, but I think it would be bet­ter to leave it as it is for the fol­low­ing reasons…”.
  • Resist the temp­ta­tion to add more than is nec­es­sary to your let­ter to the edi­tor. He or she is usu­ally very busy. Writ­ing long detailed addi­tional expla­na­tions or sub­mit­ting new sup­port­ing mate­r­ial is almost always unnec­es­sary and unwel­come. When writ­ing a response let­ter, do what you can to save the editor’s time.
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