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    Yeah some of that isn't so unusual. Now that I think about it the worst examples of bad reviewers have come from the highest-impact journals I've submitted to; the reviewer who went off on my use of the oxford comma; the one(s) who denied the validity of undergraduate-level mathematical fundamentals; the one who I'm pretty sure has a severe vision problem (speaking of which, did you provide the double-spaced single-column version?) and stuff like that. Commented May 30, 2018 at 3:36
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    But at least they looked at your paper! ;-)
    – doctorer
    Commented May 30, 2018 at 3:49
  • My point is, while all of those examples you noted may support the big picture of a system meltdown, many (most?) of them may actually just be "innocent" crappy reviews confusing the issue further. I've also had reviewers dismiss my manuscript as plagued by grammatical errors, based on only two errors or so. Commented May 30, 2018 at 4:39
  • Nah. I have thought that many times, and re-read the reviewers' comments to make sure. As I say, the third review could possibly, at a stretch, be refering to my paper. But the other 2 definitely are not. One starts: "The paper is a review of x in country y", while the paper bears NO relation to x and doesn't mention y. The second is very specific: "The word x is misspelt on page y", "Figure a on page b is captioned incorrectly" where I have not used the word x, there is no figure a, etc. There is no question in my mind that at least 2 of the reviews were written for diffent paper (s).
    – doctorer
    Commented May 30, 2018 at 4:49