publications - How to deal with an unreasonable reviewer asking to cite irrelevant articles?

Two years ago, when I was doing my master’s degree, I was working on a computational project. My supervisor was well-known in the field and a highly reputed person. We were doing a great job, trying to solve a long-standing problem.

When we made significant progress in our work, we wanted to publish it in a journal that has significant outreach for works related to our problems (We were working on flow acoustics). So we submitted out our article to a journal. The article went into review. Came back after two months. There were two referees. One of them was positive and then came the arrogant reviewer report.

I feel that the authors of the article have no knowledge of how certain computational methods can never reproduce physics.

Authors should try to reproduce the result with more reliable experimental procedures. [cites two articles from author A, B, and C]

Furthermore though the computational method is validated against work of author D, I believe authors should at least try to validate their procedure with works of [cites again different article from author A, C, and B, C, E and X, C]

Authors did not cite relevant literature [mulitple articles from author C]

I recommend publication after major revision.

It is rather obvious that author C is either our reviewer or someone close to our reviewer who is asking to cite irrelevant articles and threatens to reject our work on no scientific basis (our computational methodology was well established, robustly proved, highly cited and widely used). Unfortunately, the journal had no appeal process.

We wrote in our rebuttal to the editor that if author C is one of the reviewers, we would like to be peer-reviewed by a different reviewer.

However, the editor never seemed to care. No care was taken by the journal to provide us a fair review. Is there an efficient way to tackle such arrogant reviewers?

Answer

Other answers suggest you should try to assume that the reviewer is well-minded and act accordingly. This is definitely the null hypothesis.

But if you - after a good night's sleep - have still the strong impression that the reviewer just does not like your method and wants you use/cite his method, you should think about withdrawing and going to another journal

This does not mean that a major revision is not necessary - but your chances may be higher with a fresh set of reviewers.