How to “reject” reviewers comments

I’ve just had comments back from Applied Thermal Engineering on our new review paper.

2 reviewers said it’s almost ready to be published, with few recommendations how to improve it further.

But then there was Reviewers no. 2 who wrote almost 2 pages about why the paper is incomplete and asked for major revision.

Fine, not my first rodeo - I’ve published over 75 papers and always happy to address the questions when reasonable.

Here’s the thing - they’ve asked to include information that’s industrial “know how” and not openly available.

I get what they’re looking to achieve with this, but we’d need to reject this recommendation.

Yes, you can reject reviewers comments and recommendations when these are unreasonable or inaccurate.

Here’s how to do it in a polite way:

Kindly say that you appreciate the suggestion but need to reject it.
Provide a sound justification why you won’t be implementing that change in the manuscript.
Provide supporting evidence for your rebuttal (previous studies etc) if available.

Have you rejected reviewers comments before?

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