QuoteOriginally posted by: quartzQuoteOriginally posted by: mjIt's not unusual for me to receive two reports one very enthusiastic and one very negative. Get used to it or don't try to publish.Two from the same journal? I find a bit opaque understanding the amount of reviewers ex ante... I came from a field where 3 was the norm, but in finance sometimes there is just one.Is it considered bad practice trying to recontact the editor with a detailed explanation on why a review was meaningless and the reviewer did not understand this and that? Last time I got really silly notational nitpicking, and thought the review process was also meant to fix such irrelevant (not just minor) oversights... In general one would just resubmit elsewhere, but what when there are just 5 journals in a field, and most of them are not adequate for practice-oriented material?I am involved in the editing process of a journal (where MJ has published!). On the topic of how many referees, we generally contact 2-3 potential referees at a clip, but a majority of those contacted decline (usually politely, and occasionally with helpful suggestions of alternate candidates, which is very helpful). I will generally settle for one strong referee, but would prefer two. When you get conflicting reports, which is not that unusual, the editorial judgment starts kicking in, and it often ends up in a revise and resubmit verdict. As for appealing a bad review, I would not as an editor be troubled by it, but I haven't actually encountered it yet. It is likely to be an uphill battle, though.

Arguing with bad reviews is a waste of time in my experience.It's also really annoying when as referee you present a detailed argument as to why a paper is wrong, and the journal ignores you. A couple of years later you see the paper in print still wrong...When you ask the journal why they ignored you, they don't even bother to reply. A couple of well known journals in our field have done this to me recently.

Just curious is anyone else has received naïve or even palpably stupid comments from a referee and how they dealt with it. I decided to cooperate rather than fight back on one occasion and managed to walk a line fine enough to satisfy the fool without sacrificing the integrity of my article. That might not be always possible, I suppose.

QuoteOriginally posted by: DavidJNJust curious is anyone else has received naïve or even palpably stupid comments from a referee and how they dealt with it. I decided to cooperate rather than fight back on one occasion and managed to walk a line fine enough to satisfy the fool without sacrificing the integrity of my article. That might not be always possible, I suppose.Yes absolutely have encountered that. I think the standard way of dealing with it is to pay lip service to it, i.e. make a show of entertaining the point, but then methodically and politely point out why it is mistaken. If it is a silly point then this should not be so hard. Definately not a good idea to alienate the reviewer so its best not to make them feel stupid (even if they are being such).Of course if they are themselves tactless in raising their point, then that can be enough to put the editor off, even if it is not a valid objection. I had a variation on this theme recently... not so much stupid objections, but rather stupidly unreasonable requests for extension of the results. I say stupidly because they indicated a lack of comprehension in what would be involved to really get the results requested. However we made a of show of answering the questions by extending some work we had already started. I think this did add some value but certainly did not go as far as they had asked. But perhaps due to the initial lack of comprehension, the reviewers were satisfied with that and it was published. However, the fact that this does not really add much value to the research process is one of the reasons I left science. You can be paid well to play such silly games elsewhere, rather than in academia where putting up with it seems to be simply a requirement for survival itself.

QuoteOriginally posted by: neuroguyQuoteOriginally posted by: DavidJNJust curious is anyone else has received naïve or even palpably stupid comments from a referee and how they dealt with it. I decided to cooperate rather than fight back on one occasion and managed to walk a line fine enough to satisfy the fool without sacrificing the integrity of my article. That might not be always possible, I suppose.Yes absolutely have encountered that. I think the standard way of dealing with it is to pay lip service to it, i.e. make a show of entertaining the point, but then methodically and politely point out why it is mistaken. If it is a silly point then this should not be so hard. Do you (both) mean in responding to an outright rejection? In the other cases it might be clear already that one has to please the reviewer somehow, regardless of the validity of his points.

QuoteOriginally posted by: quartzQuoteOriginally posted by: neuroguyQuoteOriginally posted by: DavidJNJust curious is anyone else has received naïve or even palpably stupid comments from a referee and how they dealt with it. I decided to cooperate rather than fight back on one occasion and managed to walk a line fine enough to satisfy the fool without sacrificing the integrity of my article. That might not be always possible, I suppose.Yes absolutely have encountered that. I think the standard way of dealing with it is to pay lip service to it, i.e. make a show of entertaining the point, but then methodically and politely point out why it is mistaken. If it is a silly point then this should not be so hard. Do you (both) mean in responding to an outright rejection? In the other cases it might be clear already that one has to please the reviewer somehow, regardless of the validity of his points.No, not an outright rejection (pretty much a lost cause).I mean after a first round where you perhaps have a couple of positive reviews and one not so positive where those criticisms are not really valid (or 'palpably stupid'). In this case it still behooves you to difuse reviewer 3 since if you do not its likely it wont be published.

QuoteOriginally posted by: mjArguing with bad reviews is a waste of time in my experience.It's also really annoying when as referee you present a detailed argument as to why a paper is wrong, and the journal ignores you. A couple of years later you see the paper in print still wrong...When you ask the journal why they ignored you, they don't even bother to reply. A couple of well known journals in our field have done this to me recently.Don't be so cruel, less gifted scientists need some publications in their resumes too. A wrong paper is published? So what? Nobody reads scientific jounals.