I've received a perplexing peer-review to a submitted paper of mine. The editor asks for major revisions, and sent us two reviews. The first one is serious and raises good points: we'll work, amend the manuscript and send a detailed reply to the editor.
The second reviewer, however, has a 3 (minor) weird questions, and his fourth is:
The authors claimed that “[some sentence taken from the abstract]”. Please give more detailed explanations
where the sentence is actually a summary of our two-page “Results and discussion” section, i.e. the core of the paper.
I'm concerned that the second reviewer has actually not really read the full paper [1], and wonder what the best option to deal with it. I've come with the following ideas:
- In the response to the editor, respond to this request by simply saying “This claim is backed up and discussed at length in section IV”.
- Do not respond, but write to the editor saying I am concerned about whether the reviewer actually read the paper at all.
- Try to do some editing and write an evasive response, like “We have edited the manuscript to improve the clarity of the discussion on this point”.
I want to take option #1, because I think the editor will read between the lines. I'd hate to badmouth the reviewer (option #2), or risk deteriorating the manuscript by silly editing (#3).
What's your take on this? Do you have advice or suggestions on how to act in this situation?
[1] I must say here that I started by doubting the clarity of our paper, first. Trying not to be overly defensive of my work! But after asking a friend a second opinion on it, he agrees with me that the review seems shoddy.