Some time ago I submitted a paper to a preeminent journal, and yesterday I received the review letter from the editor. The email contained reviews from two reviewers.
Reviewer 1 has been very professional, and wrote a detailed, constructive, useful report of the main aspects of the paper to improve.
Reviewer 2, on the contrary, did the opposite: he/she just wrote five superficial sentences. Some of his/her comments are just false, some of them don't make any sense, and some of them are even incorrect in English!
In fact, this reviewer wrote: "The data of the manuscript are NOT available", when the truth is that our data file is publicly available online! It has always been available before submission, during the submission, and now; we the authors wrote this in the manuscript and in the cover letter. I wonder how it is possible that he/she wrote that!
Regarding the English grammar, I'm very surprised to see such poor usage of the language in this review. This is one of his/her original comments, for example:
How did you use the data to contruct and evaluate the models? I didn't see any mechnism for these purposes
Can you believe it? This sentence is very scarce and ambiguous, and even contains two English mistakes.
Reviewer 2 did not suggest a decision but just wrote:
This research is interesting, but I have a few concerns
I cannot explain in detail the comments of Reviewer 2 right now, but I can tell you that most of them make no scientific sense. I am very surprised and sorry to see that my paper, that my collaborator and I wrote in months of energy and effort, has been treated so unprofessionally, both by Reviewer 2 and by the editor who selected him/her.
The editor’s current decision is "major revision". The editor wrote that we should address the flaws of both the reviewers.
Question: What should I do now?
How can I communicate politely the issues of Reviewer 2's report to the editor?
Should I address these non-sense comments in the new version of the manuscript or not?
I strongly believe this person does not have the skills and knowledge to judge my paper. Can I ask to remove him from the reviewer list?
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