I am aware of the nature of this question, not truly scientific. Nonetheless, how many of us had to deal with nonsense comments on reviews of papers? I would like to learn with your expertise about this topic. When facts are not enough to argue a nonsense list of comments what do you do?
Thanks in advance.
Not sure what you mean by "facts are not enough", but in any case if you do not agree with a referee's point you have to present a rebuttal. That is pretty much your only choice. It can be a pain sometimes to have to write long rebuttals, but remember the referee 1) may not be a 100% match in terms of expertise and 2) Is reviewing for free, so you should always thank him/her for the review, no matter how nonsensical. :)
Justify your point with published literature as much as possible and make a clear argument. It is the role of the editor to decide what to do based on your response letter, so present the rebuttal as if you are talking with the editor about what the review says and clearly point out any points in the referee's comments that go against common understanding of the subject. If it is that clear that the referee is not making sense, the editor should be able to understand that. Provide as much proof as you can about the "facts" you think the referee is contradicting. He or she may not see them as facts or may have a different opinion, but the manuscript is your work, so it is up to you to defend it.
A simple example is when a referee tells you "this word doesn't exist". You may either reply "yes it does", and it just becomes a battleground of opinions, or you may just politely present a link to the oxford English dictionary entry for the word. If the referee doesn't recognise you as a credible source of facts (or English vocabulary for that matter), bring reinforcements in the form of credible sources.
Miguel thank you very much for your opinion and help.
What I meant with "facts are not enough" is that we tried to reply based on facts, references to rules and papers and the next answer of the referee is either interpreting the rules not correctly (according to us and other experts we have consulted) or starting different related topics. I think we used all our choices for now but the editors do not have the knowledge to say who is write or who is wrong. Long and polite rebuttals have been our strategy during months of interactive review. Now we have recommended the editors to ask for the opinion of an expert on the specific issue in order to decide.
Nonetheless, it makes me sad that a discipline (rare in this case) is being badly represented and even damaged by the opinion of a single person. I hope the editors can understand this.
I also realize that reviewing is for free and thank all the insights in our work. Off course the insights can be good or bad and we are here to learn or explain why we disagree. However, when common sense is not used or it varies from one person to the other, critical situations may occur and I would like to know what is the standard procedure in this cases.
Yeah, well. That is a rare case and should be dealt with by the editor-in-chief. What is the opinion of other reviewers? If there aren't any than you should ask for more reviewers. They cannot reject a paper based on 1 referee, unless the editors strongly agree with it, are experts on the subject and also review the paper themselves. That is a very bad thing to do and is also damaging for the credibility of a journal. A review should have 3 referees, and the reason for that is clear in this case. I'd say the journal should have ways of dealing with these situations. If not, then maybe they are not worthy of your research and you should find another journal and take any constructive criticisms you got from the review process...
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