Hi, The reviewer says the limitation of my paper is lacking experimental validation. How to respond that? Thank you.
People publish predictive papers all the time that have zero experimental support. There are different degrees of "lacking experimental validation", so there are several factors that decide whether this criticism is surmountable.
If there is statistical support (p-values, e-values, z-scores, etc) that you have but didn't mention in the paper, you should add that information. If your work is some kind of simulation, shuffling the data or adding a small amount of noise, and presumably getting the same result, will go a long way to prove your point. Generally speaking, doing extra work where at least some variables are slightly perturbed, or starting from a different random seed, might convince the reviewer.
It is difficult to give a proper advice without knowing what exactly you have done, and whether the reviewer is being reasonable in asking this question. If you are trying to publish this in a high-tier journal and you are making a strong claim without any experiments, you may have to tone down your claims, or find a journal that is more appropriate for purely predictive work.
If your work in not convincing enough without extra experiments, that could be for: 1) objective reasons of not meeting the standard; 2) reviewers generally being against predictive work alone; 3) your lack of reputation to submit a purely predictive paper. If #1 is the problem, try to find a way to address at least some of it experimentally, or as I said above get stronger non-experimental support. Not much you can do about reasons #2 and #3.
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version 2.3.6
Either do experimental validation, or say that not possible due to lack of collaboration, infrastructure, lab background. If they reject, submit elsewhere.
You should give the reviewer something. An independent way of in silico validation, other supporting analysis. Just "no" might lead to rejection. What is the paper about?
Yes, and if you are going to mention that experimental validation is not possible or outside the scope of your paper, kindly remind the reviewer of why your work is still worthy of publishing.