You Call That a Review?

I received reviewer comments back from a journal to which I submitted a manuscript last month. Overall, I'm fairly pleased because I think my paper is going to be inevitably selected for publication. I read over the reviewer comments and addressed the reviewers' concerns as I revised the manuscript. And that's when I noticed some striking differences between the comments of the two reviewers.

The first reviewer's comments went something like this: "The manuscript was well-written and study design is sound. Along with a few minor grammatical errors, I have several recommendations..." The reviewer then went on to point out that graphs could be redesigned to be more readable, and that some of the data could be modeled differently so as to be more clear and produce stronger conclusions.

The second reviewer, by contrast, barely pointed any of the paper's assets, deciding instead to use the brief comments section to criticize the manuscript. Normally, I don't mind critical reviews. In fact, I prefer them to overly doting comments, as it's difficult to better my writing without a strong critique. But in this case, 4 of the 5 reviewer comments were along the lines of "the authors should have performed a study that examined..." And then the reviewer proceeded to describe some specific experiment or study that was not at all within the scope of the manuscript. In fact, when I wrote my response to the reviewer comments, I had to point out three times that the studies described by the reviewer were beyond the scope of the current paper, but that they could possibly be the focus of future studies.

I've come across reviewer comments like these before. It sometimes seems as though a reviewer is simply trying to flaunt their intelligence, rather than actually supplying the author with any useful information. It's frustrating and it doesn't help make the manuscript better. So I may just be venting, but I'd also give this recommendation to any future journal reviewer: think about the scope of the manuscript and what information the authors are trying to convey with the results during the review process. Just because you think you're smarter than the authors doesn't mean you really are.