Carbon-Neutrality Research in China—Trends and Emerging Themes
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The article entitled “Carbon Neutrality Research in China – Trend and Emerging Themes” is written and according to the scope of the journal. Results showed that carbon neutrality publications in Chinese and English journals increased by times and times from 2020 to 2022. In Chinese journals, X.D. Hao was the most productive author with 10 publications. In English journals, Y.K. Zhou was the most productive author with publications. The article is publishable in the journal after addressing following comments.
1. Knowledge Infrastructure i.e. CNKI (ä¸å›½çŸ¥ç½‘). This is the international journal, and therefore, please remove the Chinese characters.
2. Please write the empirical results in the abstract.
3. Based on the results of the study, please write the policy implications in the abstract.
4. Every keyword should start with capital word.
5. Please remove all the Chinese characters from the article.
6. Section 2- I suggest to enrich the following statement with given studies [1,2] as “Additionally, there was another bibliometric study on climate change that has implications on carbon neutrality [1,2].
[1] Extreme weather events risk to crop-production and the adaptation of innovative management strategies to mitigate the risk: A retrospective survey of rural Punjab, Pakistan
[2] Impacts of regional emission reduction and global climate change on air quality and temperature to attain carbon neutrality in China.
7. Please write the main contributions of the study at the end of introduction section.
8. Please write the policy implications and limitations of the study at the end of article.
9. I suggest to recommend some future studies in the revised article.
Author Response
Overall comment: The article entitled “Carbon Neutrality Research in China – Trend and Emerging Themes” is written and according to the scope of the journal. Results showed that carbon neutrality publications in Chinese and English journals increased by times and times from 2020 to 2022. In Chinese journals, X.D. Hao was the most productive author with 10 publications. In English journals, Y.K. Zhou was the most productive author with publications. The article is publishable in the journal after addressing following comments.
Our response: Thanks very much for your comments. My co-author and I studied them thoroughly and revised the manuscript accordingly. We sincerely hope that we addressed your concerns appropriately in the revised manuscript.
1st Comment: Knowledge Infrastructure i.e. CNKI (ä¸å›½çŸ¥ç½‘). This is the international journal, and therefore, please remove the Chinese characters.
Our response: Thanks for your comment. As suggested by you, we removed Chinese characters in the text, Table 5, and Table 7.
2nd Comment: Please write the empirical results in the abstract.
Our response: Thanks for your comment. We rewrote the Abstract and added the empirical results in the abstract as:
“…while China is the country producing most publications on carbon neutrality. However, what are the focuses of carbon neutrality research in China? To answer such an important question, this study adopts a bibliometric approach to analyze carbon neutrality journal publications from China-based researchers during the period 2008-2022 using CNKI and Scopus. Results showed that carbon neutrality publications in Chinese and English journals by Chinese-based researchers increased from 4 in 2008 to 2879 in 2022. In Chinese journals, X.D. Hao was the most productive author with 10 publications. In English journals, Y.K. Zhou was the most productive author with 14 publications. As a whole, the Chinese Academy of Sciences was the most productive institution with 376 publications. Co-occurrence of keywords analysis…”
3rd Comment: Based on the results of the study, please write the policy implications in the abstract.
Our response: Thanks for your comment. We added the following sentences at the end of the Abstract as:
“…Most extant publications focused on policy and technological development. Emphasis shall be paid to social and people’s behavior change, sectoral carbon emissions, and carbon leakage in future research.”
4th Comment: Every keyword should start with capital word.
Our response: Thanks for your comment. As suggested by you, each keyword starts with capital word in the revised manuscript.
5th Comment: Please remove all the Chinese characters from the article.
Our response: Thanks for your comment. As suggested by you, we removed all Chinese characters from the text, Table 5 and Table 7. We kept some Chinese characters in Figure 2, Figure 3, and Figure 4 because Figure 2 presented the search in CNKI while Figure 3 and Figure 4 were outputs from VOSViewer based on CNKI data file.
6th Comment: Section 2- I suggest to enrich the following statement with given studies [1,2] as “Additionally, there was another bibliometric study on climate change that has implications on carbon neutrality [1,2].
[1] Extreme weather events risk to crop-production and the adaptation of innovative management strategies to mitigate the risk: A retrospective survey of rural Punjab, Pakistan
[2] Impacts of regional emission reduction and global climate change on air quality and temperature to attain carbon neutrality in China.
Our response: Thanks for your comment. We studied these two references and found them to be very relevant. In the revised manuscript. We added the following sentence in Section 2:
“… In fact, carbon emission reduction can lower the risk of climate change and the occurrence of extreme weather [41,42]…”
The new references include:
- Xu, B.; Wang, T.; Ma, D.; Song, R.; Zhang, M.; Gao, L.; Li, S.; Zhang, B.; Li, M.; Xie, M. Impacts of regional emission reduction and global climate change on air quality and temperature to attain carbon neutrality in China. Atmos. Res. 2022, 279, 106384.
- Elahi, E.; Khalid, Z.; Tauni, M.Z.; Zhang, H.; Lirong, X. Extreme weather events risk to crop-production and the adaptation of innovative management strategies to mitigate the risk: A retrospective survey of rural Punjab, Pakistan. Technovation 2022, 117, 102255.
7th Comment: Please write the main contributions of the study at the end of introduction section.
Our response: Thanks for your comment. As suggested by you, we added the study’s contributions at the end of Introduction as:
“…Specifically, the contributions of the study are four folds. First, the study identifies the most productive authors and affiliations of carbon neutrality research in China. Second, it reveals the highly cited carbon neutrality publications in Chinese/English journals and their focuses while these focuses may have significant implications for policy development and deployment. Third, it identifies emerging themes of carbon neutrality research that may help scholars to formulate their future research plan. Fourth and finally, it also sheds light in some areas that warrant future investigation.”
8th Comment: Please write the policy implications and limitations of the study at the end of article.
Our response: Thanks for your comment. As suggested by you, we added policy implications and limitations at the end of article as:
“…Knowing each individual, organization, and community can make a profound difference on energy utilization and pollutant emissions such as CO2, the central and provincial governments of China need to establish policies that highlight the importance and awareness of carbon neutrality and different paths to achieve the 30-60 goals through public participation. Besides, sectoral carbon emissions and carbon leakage shall be thoroughly investigated. Finally, this study has two limitations. First, it was a cross-sectional study and we performed bibliometric analysis on data from CNKI and Scopus covering the period 2008-2022. As the number of publications on carbon neutrality has increased rapidly since 2020, new hotspots and research themes may emerge in the near future. Future research using our approach can be carried out to reveal such new hotspots and emerging research themes. Second, a bibliometric analysis is useful to provide an overview of a broad research topic. Nevertheless, it may lack sufficient details on some specific topics or technologies. Future research such as systematic literature reviews can be carried out on some important carbon neutrality technologies such as biomass fuels, and electrocatalysts.”
9th Comment: I suggest to recommend some future studies in the revised article.
Our response: Thanks for your comment. As suggested by you, we recommended some future research works as:
“…As the number of publications on carbon neutrality has increased rapidly since 2020, new hotspots and research themes may emerge in the near future. Future research using our approach can be carried out to reveal such new hotspots and emerging research themes. Second, a bibliometric analysis is useful to provide an over-view of a broad research topic. Nevertheless, it may lack sufficient details on some specific topics or technologies. Future research such as systematic literature reviews can be carried out on some important carbon neutrality technologies such as biomass fuels, and electrocatalysts.”
Reviewer 2 Report
This is a well written paper.
The authors may include carbon credits and carbon trading to improve the quality of paper.
Author Response
1st Comment: This is a well written paper.
Our response: Thanks so much for your comment.
2nd Comment: The authors may include carbon credits and carbon trading to improve the quality of paper.
Our response: Thanks for your comment. As suggested by you, we added a new paragraph in Implications (section 4.1) in which we covered carbon credits and carbon trading as follows:
“…Financial incentives such as carbon credits, carbon trading and carbon taxes can encourage commercial and industrial firms to reduce their carbon footprint [73-75] as well as to invest in renewable energy technologies and carbon sequestration projects [72,76]. Additionally, it is also feasible to assign personal carbon quota to individuals in order to accelerate carbon neutrality [77]. However, carbon offsetting such as a combination of carbon trading and forestation shall be carried out with great caution [9]. It is because carbon offsetting may blind people to believe that new CO2 due to the burning of fossil fuels i.e. old biomass can be captured by plants i.e. new biomass. Yet, the truth is that the nature takes millions of years for turning biomass to fossil fuels under complex geothermal-chemical processes [9,78] and the continual burning of fossil fuels has disrupted atmospheric O2/CO2 ratio and has caused significant climate change [78,79]. Finally, the governments can fund cutting-edge research that aims to develop ingenious ways to turn atmospheric CO2 to carbon-based fuels and products [80-82], achieving a long-run, net-zero world.”
Reviewer 3 Report
'carbon neutrality' as a scientific term should be properly introduced.
he motivation of the study should be better supported; why China; why Chiva vs. rest of the world; what sort of information provides descriptive statistics by university and by source title?
a review should be concentrated on qualitative study, not on quantitative by number and descriptive statistics
in my opinion the manuscript better fit as an 'editorial', 'essay', 'opinion' or 'perspective' or even 'casereport' (see the full list of article type options: as of June 30, 2023: "abstract, addendum, article, book, bookreview, briefreport, casereport, comment, commentary, communication, conferenceproceedings, correction, conferencereport, entry, expressionofconcern, extendedabstract, datadescriptor, editorial, essay, erratum, hypothesis, interestingimage, obituary, opinion, projectreport, reply, retraction, review, perspective, protocol, shortnote, studyprotocol, systematicreview, supfile, technicalnote, viewpoint, guidelines, registeredreport, tutorial")
58 references for a review is a short list. Please find here two possible works which can be integrated: Sustainability 2022, 14(15), 9192; http://rdcu.be/dgk9D.
also some more elaborated discussion about the role of the O2/CO2 ratio in the biogeochemical cycles is welcomed.
overall the manuscript is well written and deserves publication, but the author should address at least some of the concerns expressed below.
Author Response
1st Comment: 'Carbon neutrality' as a scientific term should be properly introduced.
Our response: Thanks very much for your comment. As suggested by you, we defined the term clearly in the third paragraph of Introduction (right after it was mentioned) as:
“…Specifically, carbon neutrality is characterized by net-zero carbon emission in which the discharge of carbon compounds into and the removal of carbon compounds from the atmosphere are the same [9]….”
2nd Comment: The motivation of the study should be better supported; why China; why China vs. rest of the world; what sort of information provides descriptive statistics by university and by source title?
Our response: Thanks very much for your comment. We clarified why China was chosen as the object of this study clearly in the Abstract. We rewrote the first three sentences as:
“Carbon neutrality is a key human endeavor to deal with global climate while China is the country producing most publications on carbon neutrality. However, what are the focuses of carbon neutrality research in China? To answer such an important question, this study adopts a bibliometric approach to analyze carbon neutrality journal publications from China-based researchers during the period 2008-2022 using CNKI and Scopus. Results showed…”
For the information provided by the analyses based on affiliation/university and source title, we added some more details in the second and third paragraphs of Discussion (section 4) as:
“…Interestingly, all top 9 universities/institutions that produced most carbon neutrality articles in Chinese journals are situated in Beijing, China (see Table 2). According to Scopus, the top 3 universities/institutions that produced most carbon neutrality publications in English journals are situated in Beijing, followed by Tianjin University (in Tianjin), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (in Shanghai), and North China Electric Power University (also in Beijing). These findings show that Beijing is the academic center of carbon neutrality research in China.
In China, Natural Gas Industry published the largest number (14) of carbon neutrality articles in Chinese, reflecting that the oil and gas industry in China put in a lot of effort to explore different ways including renewable energy technologies to achieve carbon neutrality. In English academic publishing, Sustainability (Switzerland) as a multidisciplinary journal was the one publishing the largest number (156) of carbon neutrality publications as shown in Table 3….”
3rd Comment: A review should be concentrated on qualitative study, not on quantitative by number and descriptive statistics. in my opinion the manuscript better fit as an 'editorial', 'essay', 'opinion' or 'perspective' or even 'case report' (see the full list of article type options: as of June 30, 2023: "abstract, addendum, article, book, book review, brief report, case report, comment, commentary, communication, conference proceedings, correction, conference report, entry, expression of concern, extended abstract, data descriptor, editorial, essay, erratum, hypothesis, interesting image, obituary, opinion, project report, reply, retraction, review, perspective, protocol, short note, study protocol, systematic review, supfile, technical note, viewpoint, guidelines, registered report, tutorial").
Our response: Thanks very much for your comment. We selected “Review” as the type of this paper because we reviewed carbon neutrality articles using a bibliometric approach. It is very true that we provided quantitative information about the number of publications by authors, affiliations, source titles, funding bodies, etc. Nevertheless, we also carried a thorough qualitative review on highly cited Chinese (and English) carbon neutrality publications in Results (section 3; from pages 7 to 9).
4th Comment: 58 references for a review is a short list. Please find here two possible works which can be integrated: Sustainability 2022, 14(15), 9192; http://rdcu.be/dgk9D.
Our response: Thanks for your comment and the suggested articles. We studied these two articles thoroughly and they were well written, particularly the one appearing in Sustainability. Therefore, we added these two articles as references in the revised manuscript (Ref. 75 and Ref. 82). Additionally, we rewrote some sections in this round of revision and included more references in Introduction and Discussion. The number of references increased to 82 in the revised manuscript.
5th Comment: Also some more elaborated discussion about the role of the O2/CO2 ratio in the biogeochemical cycles is welcomed.
Our response: Thanks very much for your comment and suggestion. In the revised manuscript, we added the following sentences in the second paragraph of Implications (section 4.1):
“…carbon offsetting such as a combination of carbon trading and forestation shall be carried out with great caution [9]. It is because carbon offsetting may blind people to believe that new CO2 due to the burning of fossil fuels i.e. old biomass can be captured by plants i.e. new biomass. Yet, the truth is that the nature takes millions of years for turning biomass to fossil fuels under complex geothermal-chemical processes [9,78] and the continual burning of fossil fuels has disrupted atmospheric O2/CO2 ratio and has caused significant climate change [78,79]…”
6th Comment: Overall the manuscript is well written and deserves publication, but the author should address at least some of the concerns expressed below.
Our response: Thanks so much for your comments (and all the suggestions you made) that help improving the quality of our manuscript. We sincerely hope that we addressed your comments appropriately in the revised manuscript.
Reviewer 4 Report
Dear Authors,
The subject of your paper is very interesting. I'm not fan of bibliographic studies, but I accept they can be important to provide some future ways of research. Trying to help you in increasing the interest of your paper to the readers, and acting as a reader more than a reviewer, I'm suggesting the following actions:
1. In your abstract, you must highlight the reasons why your paper was written, the main public target of the paper, your main motivations and how your approach is novel in the field.
2. The description of the main results in the abstract, regarding the paper typology, doesn't seem important. More than that, the methodology used is important to the reader realize how the study was carried out and if it is reliable.
3. Chapter 2 (beginning part) is not useful. In the Materials and Methods section, the reader expects to find a workflow on how the study was performed, namely: the sources of information used, the criteria to select the studies, the keywords used and its combination, and so on. Thus, 2.1 is useful, but the initial part do not. The flowchart should be improved. The criteria selection also should be improved.
4. Figures 3 and 4 just in Chinese don't help the paper being cited in the future. Please improve.
5. The number of papers used as reference for a bibliographic study seems very short.
Best wishes.
Dear Editors,
Unfortunately, I'm not fan of bibliographic studies because they usefulness seems very short for me, but it is a personal way of thinking.
The paper is well performed and the discussion and results are very well carried out and described. Only the methodology needs to be improved.
Kind regards,
Francisco Silva
Author Response
Overall comment: The subject of your paper is very interesting. I'm not fan of bibliographic studies, but I accept they can be important to provide some future ways of research. Trying to help you in increasing the interest of your paper to the readers, and acting as a reader more than a reviewer, I'm suggesting the following actions.
Our response: Thanks so much for your comments. My co-author and I studied them thoroughly and revised the manuscript accordingly. We sincerely hope that we addressed your concerns appropriately in the revised manuscript.
1st Comment: In your abstract, you must highlight the reasons why your paper was written, the main public target of the paper, your main motivations and how your approach is novel in the field.
Our response: Thanks for your comment. As suggested by you, we rewrote the Abstract as:
“Carbon neutrality is a key human endeavor to deal with global climate while China is the country producing most publications on carbon neutrality. However, what are the focuses of carbon neutrality research in China? To answer such an important question, this study adopts a bibliometric approach to analyze carbon neutrality journal publications from China-based researchers…”
2nd Comment: The description of the main results in the abstract, regarding the paper typology, doesn't seem important. More than that, the methodology used is important to the reader realize how the study was carried out and if it is reliable.
Our response: Thanks for your comment. As suggested by you, we clarified the method as:
“…this study adopts a bibliometric approach to analyze carbon neutrality journal publications from China-based researchers during the period 2008-2022 using CNKI and Scopus. Results showed…”
3rd Comment: Chapter 2 (beginning part) is not useful. In the Materials and Methods section, the reader expects to find a workflow on how the study was performed, namely: the sources of information used, the criteria to select the studies, the keywords used and its combination, and so on. Thus, 2.1 is useful, but the initial part do not. The flowchart should be improved. The criteria selection also should be improved.
Our response: Thanks for your comment. The first part of Section 2 explained the purpose of bibliometric analysis and described some of the popular academic abstracting and indexing databases such as Scopus and CNKI for this type of analysis while Section 2.1 focuses on CNKI and Scopus. Additionally, we clarified how we conducted the search in Scopus as:
“…More specifically, 3,195 journal publications in English were authored/co-authored by researchers from China after excluding 103 articles-in-press. In Scopus term, this search was [TITLE-ABS-KEY ( "carbon neutrality" OR "carbon neutral" ) AND PUBYEAR > 2007 AND PUBYEAR < 2023 AND ( LIMIT-TO ( PUBSTAGE , "final" ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( AF-FILCOUNTRY , "China" ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( SRCTYPE , "j" ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( LAN-GUAGE , "English" ) )].”
4th Comment: Figures 3 and 4 just in Chinese don't help the paper being cited in the future. Please improve.
Our response: Thanks for your comment. Figures 3(a) and 4 included Chinese characters as they were outputs from VOSViewer using CNKI data. Nevertheless, we described them fully in English (see pages 10 and 11). In the revised manuscript, we removed all Chinese characters in the text and tables.
5th Comment: The number of papers used as reference for a bibliographic study seems very short.
Our response: Thanks for your comment. In the revised manuscript, we expanded Introduction, Discussion (including implications), Conclusion, etc. As a result, the number of references increased from 58 (in the original manuscript) to 82 (in the revised manuscript).
Reviewer 5 Report
The topic is important. The carbon neutrality is a direction treated intensively in the literature in the last few years. In the paper, the authors presented a bibliometric approach to explore carbon neutrality research in China. They analyzed carbon neutrality journal publications from China-based researchers using CNKI and Scopus between 2008-2022. The study aimed to answer some key questions regarding the research from the proposed domain.
Regarding the structure of the paper:
1. The topic is well-defined but not original.
2. The abstract is clear and presents correctly the subject addressed in this paper.
3. The paper contains all sections beginning with a good introduction, where the goals of the investigation are presented. The treated topic is well explained in the next section regarding materials and methods used in the paper. Finally, the obtained results are presented in the case study, followed by discussions and conclusions.
4. The questions are identified correct.
5. The English language quality and style of this paper are appropriate and understandable.
Regarding the weaknesses of the paper:
1. The authors should highlight the differences between the proposed study and other similar studies (even if they do not refer to China).
2. The authors should highlight the originality of the proposed study because what they analyzed can be found in other similar studies. The readers need to understand the scientific contribution of this research.
Author Response
Overall comment: The topic is important. The carbon neutrality is a direction treated intensively in the literature in the last few years. In the paper, the authors presented a bibliometric approach to explore carbon neutrality research in China. They analyzed carbon neutrality journal publications from China-based researchers using CNKI and Scopus between 2008-2022. The study aimed to answer some key questions regarding the research from the proposed domain.
Regarding the structure of the paper:
- The topic is well-defined but not original.
- The abstract is clear and presents correctly the subject addressed in this paper.
- The paper contains all sections beginning with a good introduction, where the goals of the investigation are presented. The treated topic is well explained in the next section regarding materials and methods used in the paper. Finally, the obtained results are presented in the case study, followed by discussions and conclusions.
- The questions are identified correct.
- The English language quality and style of this paper are appropriate and understandable.
Our response: Thanks so much for your comments.
1st Comment: Regarding the weaknesses of the paper: 1. The authors should highlight the differences between the proposed study and other similar studies (even if they do not refer to China). 2. The authors should highlight the originality of the proposed study because what they analyzed can be found in other similar studies. The readers need to understand the scientific contribution of this research.
Our response: Thanks so much for your comments and suggestions. In the revised manuscript, we highlighted some of the similarities and differences between the study and another similar study as:
“…Table 4 reveals that the National Natural Science Foundation was the most supportive funding body for carbon neutrality researches published in both Chinese and English journals, answering RQ4. This finding was consistent with the finding of Chung and To [9] who focused on carbon neutrality publications in English journals, conference proceedings, and books… With respect to the 5 highly cited English journal publications, all of them were reviews and 3 of them focused on photocatalytic conversion/reduction of CO2 into biofuels and other products [53-55]. These findings addressed RQ5. Nevertheless, these findings were different from the finding of Chung and To [9] who reported that the 5 highly cited English journal publications (each with a citation over 3,000) focused on turning biomass to biofuels and other carbon-based products but none of the authors affiliated with Chinese institutions….
…Co-occurrence of keywords analysis using the selected 3195 English journal publications identified three clusters. They were “carbon, carbon neutralities, emission control, and energy utilization” (in the red cluster), “carbon dioxide, carbon neutrals, biomass, and electrocatalysts” (in the green cluster), and “China, carbon neutrality, sustainable development, and economic development” (in the blue cluster) as shown in Figure 5. When the number of occurrences was considered, carbon (in the red cluster) ranked first with 1,169 occurrences, followed by carbon dioxide (in the green cluster) with 895 occurrences, and China (in the blue cluster) with 770 occurrences as shown in Table 8. These findings ad-dressed RQ6. Additionally, these findings extended the findings of Chung and To [9] who reported global carbon neutrality research published in English journals to be characterized by four clusters, namely “carbon neutrals, biofuels, and hydrogen”, “carbon neutralities, energy efficiency, energy utilization, and renewable energies” (similar to the red cluster reported in this study), “carbon neutrality, sustainable development, and China” (similar to the blue cluster reported in this study”, and “greenhouse gases, gas emissions, coal, and global warming”. Thus, it is likely that China will take a pragmatic and balanced approach to achieve the 30-60 goals.”
For the contribution of our study, we highlighted them more clearly at the end of Introduction in the revised manuscript as:
“…Specifically, the contributions of the study are four folds. First, the study identifies the most productive authors and affiliations of carbon neutrality research in China. Second, it reveals the highly cited carbon neutrality publications in Chinese/English journals and their focuses while these focuses may have significant implications for policy development and deployment. Third, it identifies emerging themes of carbon neutrality research that may help scholars to formulate their future research plan. Fourth and finally, it also sheds light in some areas that warrant future investigation.”
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you very much for addressing the previous comments.
Since World Journal is in English, please do not use any other language in the figures.
Author Response
Comment: Thank you very much for addressing the previous comments. Since World Journal is in English, please do not use any other language in the figures.
Our response: Thanks very much for your comment. As suggested by you, we removed “Chinese” from the manuscript. Changes in the updated manuscript include (i) Figure 3(a) was removed and details were described in the text (all in English), and (ii) Figure 4 now contained English terms. Once again, please accept our sincere thanks for helping us improve the manuscript’s quality continually.
Reviewer 5 Report
The authors performed changes to the initial manuscript. New explanations, elaborations of details, and revisions have been added.
Minor modifications:
The authors should include in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 terms in English.
Author Response
Comment: The authors performed changes to the initial manuscript. New explanations, elaborations of details, and revisions have been added.
Our response: Thanks very much for your comment.
1st specific comment: Minor modifications: The authors should include in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 terms in English.
Our response: Thanks for your comment. As suggested by you, we made the following changes: (i) Figure 3(a) was removed and details were described in the text (all in English; the updated Figure 3 containing names in English only), and (ii) Figure 4 now contained English terms. Once again, please accept our sincere thanks for helping us improve the manuscript’s quality continually.
