英文论文评审意见汇总（10）

武夷山

第一则

对ISSI 2015 大会一篇投稿的审阅意见

The paper shows that citation is not the most important variant in performance evaluations through PCA approach.

But the author failed to explain the data source as they should.

PCA did provide richer information than what common evaluation methods could provide. Therefore, this paper is a useful exploration.

The author utilized the data expounded in a previous paper and did not give any description about the data source. Since this paper is an independent contribution, the basic description on data source is necessary.

The paper has Discussion section, but no Conclusion is available. It seems to me that the paper provides a quite sudden end, which makes readers uncomfortable.

If the number of contributions is not very large, then this paper is OK. If we have plenty of contributions to choose from, then we could urge the authors to further improve their paper.

For example, they agree that the count of funding acknowledgements in a paper is a predictor of the paper’s impact. However, many other people believe that applying for funding support from different funding sources based on the same research idea borders on misconduct. Therefore, at least some discussion is needed to deal with such controversy.

Another point. The authors think that citation is not so ideal an indicator, but do not provide constructive recommendations: based on the current PCA study, what indicator or index should be given more attention in the future evaluations?

第二则

20120721

This article could help international readers to learn about China’s STM journals, therefore it is worth publication.

The authors could improve the manuscript from several aspects:

1.      There are a few grammatical errors. I’ll attach the manuscript where I marked some places that should be corrected. Here and there in the manuscript are some Chinglish-styled sentences. The authors could consult professional language brushing companies for assistance or at least seek help from native English speakers.

2.      Since the manuscript is contributed to an international journal, the authors should speak to international audience. But my impression is that it basically speaks to domestic Chinese audience----saying a lot about how Chinese stakeholders should do while saying little about how international journal community and science community could provide help to the Chinese journal publishing community.

When making recommendations, the authors should have comprehensive considerations. Just cite a small example: They recommend MOE, NSFC, CAST, CAS to do something but failed to mention Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST). How could China’s STM journals develop well without MOST’s attention and coordination ? In fact, MOST established so-called Elite Journals Program several years ago and it has made nice impact. 

第三则

20130206

This is a very interesting and meaningful paper! The exploration is innovative and the findings insightful. However, the paper could be improved in two aspects:

1.      The methodology could be more solid.

The authors relied on the occurrence of “inter-, multi-, and trans-discipl” prefixes as keywords to identify articles that discuss interdisciplinarity. However, not all the authors discussing on it would have the habit of citing these words. As a result, considerable amount of articles might have been missed or excluded, which should not. For instance, there is a British journal called Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, and every paper published by this journal should be naturally a discussion paper on interdisciplinarity in abstract or concrete sense. But I am sure that not all those papers used “inter-, multi-, and trans-discipl” as keywords or “topic words”. The authors are recommended to discuss this flaw—a potentially incomplete collection of target articles.

The authors said “those three terms, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary, are highly related”. That is true, but a little discerning would be better for readers unfamiliar with this topic. So far the best document I have ever met that clarifies the relationship among the three very well is F. Wickson’s paper, Transdisciplinary research: Characteristics, quandaries and quality ( Futures, 2006, No.9). I am wondering whether this paper is among 47,631 articles retrieved by the authors. If not, that would be a big pity! At least I suggest that authors cite this important paper.

2.      Better grammar is needed.

There are quite a few grammatical errors. Examples are as follows (I will use the symbol → to stand for “should change into”)  :

…is particularly benefit…→is particularly beneficial…

… used to analysis→used to analyze

We select 30 categories that each category contains…→We select 30 categories that  contain…

Detailed analyze→detailed analysis

Famous researches→famous researchers

Build upon→building upon