Bibliometric Analysis of Trends in Global Sustainable Livelihood Research
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Congratulations to the authors.
It is a very interesting and sound analysis. The topic was approached from all the possible sides.
I like the keywords analysis and the broad range of figures.
Author Response
Dear reviewer
Thank you for your letter and comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Bibliometric Analysis of Trends in Global Sustainable Livelihoods Research”. Your comments and recognition are valuable to us. Thank you.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
This article focuses on a topic of interest but the paper, and its content, requires substantial changes, which involve a complete restructuring of the same to achieve the requirements of quality and scientific rigor, necessary for publication in the journal.
In general:
- Avoid using the first person plural (we, us, our).
- Read the "Instructions for Authors"
- Avoid numbering.
Abstract:
- The conclusions are repeated with the abstract.
Introduction:
- The use of acronyms is random (line 54), repeated (58) or unnecessary. Some of the acronyms are used once.
- References do not correspond to those required by the publisher. Most are all wrong (line 44, 61, 79, 80, 81...) and sometimes use the wrong procedure (line 57, 90, 93...).
- Generate action among SL researchers?
- What is a "visual analysis?
Methodology:
- Why not Scopus?
- Why not h-index?
- Avoid numbering (line 141 or 158)
- Is WoS the biggest abstract and citation-source database? I don't think so.
- Lines 238 or 240 show that the article was not written originally for this journal and has not been reviewed.
- Figure 3 is a copy-paste from WoS.
- Distribution of Publication Output in Journals should be reviewed. Lines 301 to 303 are almost unintelligible.
- Why are USA and UK the most active research countries? Is that a conclusion?
- Line 393: A phrase should not start with a parenthesis.
- Figure 14.- The name of this figure is almost an explanation
Conclusions
There is no conclusions or discusion.
The conclusions are a summary of results
References.
There is not a single reference according to the indications of the journal!.
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 2 Comments
Dear Reviewer,
We deeply appreciate your constructive comments and suggestions, which are all valuable and helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have studied the comments carefully, and have made revisions which we hope meet with approval. The point-by-point responses to the comments are as follows.
Point 1: In general: - Avoid using the first person plural (we, us, our).
Response 1: Thank you for your constructive suggestions. We have replaced the first person plural in the paper. Please check the paper for the revisions.
Point 2: Read the "Instructions for Authors" - Avoid numbering.
Response 2: Thank you for your suggestion. We have already deleted the unnecessary serial numbers in the paper. Please the paper for the revisions.
Point 3: Abstract: - The conclusions are repeated with the abstract.
Response 3: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. We have rewritten the conclusion part. Please check the final part.
Point 4: Introduction:
- The use of acronyms is random (line 54), repeated (58) or unnecessary. Some of the acronyms are used once.
- References do not correspond to those required by the publisher. Most are all wrong (line 44, 61, 79, 80, 81...) and sometimes use the wrong procedure (line 57, 90, 93...).
- Generate action among SL researchers?
- What is a "visual analysis?
Response 4:
§ Thank you for your advices. We have changed the unnecessary acronyms and references according to the requirements of publisher.
§ What we are trying to explain is that the paper aims to reveal the cooperation network among various countries, institution and even individuals in the SL field instead of generate actions among SL researchers. The problem has been corrected.
§ As for the “visual analysis”, there might be some misunderstanding made by us. We think it is better to use word “visualization” rather than “visual analysis”, and we changed it. Please check paper for the revision.
Point 5: Methodology:
- Why not Scopus?
- Why not h-index?
- Avoid numbering (line 141 or 158)
- Is WoS the biggest abstract and citation-source database? I don't think so. –
- Lines 238 or 240 show that the article was not written originally for this journal and has not been reviewed.
- Figure 3 is a copy-paste from WoS.
- Distribution of Publication Output in Journals should be reviewed. Lines 301 to 303 are almost unintelligible.
- Why are USA and UK the most active research countries? Is that a conclusion?
- Line 393: A phrase should not start with a parenthesis.
- Figure 14. - The name of this figure is almost an explanation
Response 5:
§ WOS was developed earlier than Scopus, and it was the only source for the assessment of scientific output worldwide because of its multidisciplinary and international coverage for many years. It is widely used in the field of bibliometrics. Also, it is adopted by scientific community with a relatively high acceptance, especially in the evaluation of international journals. The emergence of Elsevier’s Scopus database is in late 2004. Moreover, compared with WOS, Scopus was not widely used like WOS at present. It is undeniable fact that there is a rapid development of Scopus and scientific community begins to adopt it gradually. Scopus could be considered a good alternative to WOS. Finally, this paper chose WOS for conducting biblimoteric analysis.
§ This study use impact factor to evaluate the quality of journals mainly because it is widely recognized and used as an indicator with greater influence.
§ We have deleted unnecessary numbering. Please check for the revisions.
§ The mistake has been revised in the paper. WOS is relatively representative and authoritative index databases rather the biggest one.
§ The mistakes have been corrected. Please check for the revision.
§ This research attempts to illustrate the global focus on sustainable livelihoods though figure 3, which is more convincing by adopting original WOS data and analysis report with figures.
§ This study selects the top 10 journals as one of the main research objects, which is considered representative as the top 10 journals among these 593 accounted for 15.62% of the 2701 SL-related papers. The purpose is to investigate the influential journals and the journals with the most paper published. The field of sustainable livelihoods is an interdisciplinary field with a large number papers published on various journals, it is not necessary to include all of them. Lines 301 to 303 are the annotation for table 2 in terms of explanation of Q1, Q2, Q3 and A4, which are not the body of the main text.
§ We have revised the reasons in the paper. Please check for the revision.
§ We have deleted parenthesis in the context.
§ We have changed the name of figure 14.
Point 6: Conclusions
There is no conclusion or discussion. The conclusions are a summary of results References.
There is not a single reference according to the indications of the journal!
Response 6: Thank you for your suggestion. We have rewritten the conclusion part. Please check for the revision. Most importantly, all the references have been modified according to the requirements of publisher. Thank you so much.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper presents a thorough citation analysis of sustainable livelihoods. Using the suite of tools in CiteSpace, the data and visualizations possible can be fun and each one interesting. It is wonderful to see more and more fields using these tools. I only suggest the infusion of a better understanding of why you chose to focus on some of the analysis and a more coherent discussion of what each one means. The concluding remarks on page 23 are spot on, but it would be better if those thoughts were expanded and discuss each analysis in more details in a broader discussion section. Perhaps, not all the analysis that are in this paper are necessary. Some are more interesting to me than others, but you can decide what path makes the most sense moving forward for a stronger conclusion.
For example, on page 4, the statement 'a database that has an impact factor higher than that of other databases' is not accurate. An impact factor is a ratio for journals and databases do not have them. The databases you used are technically indexes without the fulltext that a database would have. These indexes are the first to provide access and allow for these simple scientometrics developed by Eugene Garfield. This type of simple misstep in describing the method makes me wonder what else might be misunderstood. In fact, your literature review of these methods should be beefed up with even more description of the uses and limitations of some of the methods you employ. You all might benefit from further readings in the journal Scientometrics or any of these classics:
· Chen, C. 2006. CiteSpace II: Detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57 (3): 359–77.
· Ding, W., & Chen, C. 2014. Dynamic topic detection and tracking: A comparison of HDP, C‐word, and cocitation methods. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(10), 2084-2097.
· Small, H. 1973. Co-citation in the scientific literature: A new measure of the relationship between two documents. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 24:265–69.
· Small, H. 1980. Co-citation context analysis and the structure of paradigms. Journal of Documentation, 36 (3): 183–96.
· Small, H., & Griffith, B.C. 1974. The structure of scientific literatures: I. Identifying and graphing specialties. Science Studies, 4:339–65.
· Wei, F., Grubesic, T. H., & Bishop, B. W. (2015). Exploring the GIS knowledge domain using CiteSpace. The Professional Geographer, 67(3), 374-384.
· White, H. D., and K. W. McCain. 1998. Visualizing a discipline: An author co-citation analysis of information science, 1972–1995. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49 (4): 327–55.
minor change-
on page 21 lines 552-559 show up as double spaced and don't match the spacing of the rest of the paper.
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 3 Comments
Dear Reviewer,
We deeply appreciate your constructive comments and suggestions, which are all valuable and helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have studied the comments carefully, and have made revisions which we hope meet with approval. The point-by-point responses to the comments are as follows.
Point 1: The paper presents a thorough citation analysis of sustainable livelihoods. Using the suite of tools in CiteSpace, the data and visualizations possible can be fun and each one interesting. It is wonderful to see more and more fields using these tools. I only suggest the infusion of a better understanding of why you chose to focus on some of the analysis and a more coherent discussion of what each one means. The concluding remarks on page 23 are spot on, but it would be better if those thoughts were expanded and discuss each analysis in more details in a broader discussion section. Perhaps, not all the analysis that are in this paper are necessary. Some are more interesting to me than others, but you can decide what path makes the most sense moving forward for a stronger conclusion.
For example, on page 4, the statement 'a database that has an impact factor higher than that of other databases' is not accurate. An impact factor is a ratio for journals and databases do not have them. The databases you used are technically indexes without the fulltext that a database would have. These indexes are the first to provide access and allow for these simple scientometrics developed by Eugene Garfield. This type of simple misstep in describing the method makes me wonder what else might be misunderstood. In fact, your literature review of these methods should be beefed up with even more description of the uses and limitations of some of the methods you employ. You all might benefit from further readings in the journal Scientometrics or any of these classics:
· Chen, C. 2006. CiteSpace II: Detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57 (3): 359–77.
· Ding, W., & Chen, C. 2014. Dynamic topic detection and tracking: A comparison of HDP, C‐word, and cocitation methods. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(10), 2084-2097.
· Small, H. 1973. Co-citation in the scientific literature: A new measure of the relationship between two documents. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 24:265–69.
· Small, H. 1980. Co-citation context analysis and the structure of paradigms. Journal of Documentation, 36 (3): 183–96.
· Small, H., & Griffith, B.C. 1974. The structure of scientific literatures: I. Identifying and graphing specialties. Science Studies, 4:339–65.
· Wei, F., Grubesic, T. H., & Bishop, B. W. (2015). Exploring the GIS knowledge domain using CiteSpace. The Professional Geographer, 67(3), 374-384.
· White, H. D., and K. W. McCain. 1998. Visualizing a discipline: An author co-citation analysis of information science, 1972–1995. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49 (4): 327–55.
minor change- on page 21 lines 552-559 show up as double spaced and don't match the spacing of the rest of the paper.
Response 1:
§ Thank you for your constructive suggestions. We have corrected the mistake we made about the impact factor.
§ We rewrite the conclusion part, please check for revision.
§ As for the limitations of bibliomteric analysis, there is not much restrictions when doing bibliometric analysis for our research, including trend analysis, hot spots analysis, because the most important information we need are provided by the database (e.g. the abstract, keywords and so on), that is why we did not write to much about the limitation of the method we adopted.
§ We sincerely appreciate your suggestion and articles you provided. We have read them carefully which are very useful and classic in terms of Scientometrics.
§ We changed the line spacing (page 21 lines 552-559) to match the rest of the paper.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
I apreciate the changes done, but review:
Line 84, 91, 95, 97.
Figure 3: a copy-paste from WOS is not apropiate for a research paper.
Limitation section is missing, please add.
Thanks
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We deeply appreciate your constructive comments and suggestions, and we have made revisions which we hope meet with approval. The point-by-point responses to the comments are as follows.
Point 1: I appreciate the changes done, but review: Line 84, 91, 95, 97.
Figure 3: a copy-paste from WOS is not appropriate for a research paper. Limitation section is missing, please add.
Response 1: Thank you for your constructive suggestions.
§ We have modified all of the in text references.
§ We have deleted the previous picture and made a new old instead. Please check for the revision.
§ We have added the limitation section in the paper. Please check the modified contents.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 3
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors,
Figuer 3 continues being a copy-paste from WOS, a screenshot. Now you have added some information but the figure remain.
Limitations means limitations on your research. You could use Scopus, Latindex, h-index, Google Scholar... but you didn't... so your research has limitations and you should reflect them.
You have explain the limitations of WOS!
