英文论文审稿意见汇总（1）

武夷山

第一则

1.      It is a typical or “normal” scientometric paper, without particular attractions and without particular defects either.

2.      The author should explain why the 1996-2008 period was chosen, rather than say 1994-2008? Or 1995-2008?

3.       When analyzing the growth trend of environmental sciences literature, it is better to make a comparison with the total growth rate of all Indian papers over the same period, or with the growth rate of all environmental science papers in the world. Without such comparisons, the analysis of a simple growth pattern is pointless.

4.      The three suggestions are too shallow and too unrealistic. Even if India has more specialist journals, how could you change Indian authors’ unwillingness to contribute to domestic journals? Recommending Thomson Reuters to accept the 3 Indian journals into SCI is fruitless, since this organization has its own strict criteria for selecting source journals. However, the author could make other more meaningful discussions, such as how to improve IF of Indian journals and how to attract more foreign authors to contribute to Indian journals, etc. Only when the IF of Indian journals are close to international journals will Indian scientists happily  and willingly utilize such publication channels.

5.      There are a lot of sentences with grammatical errors. Just cite one example: “It is observed from the Table 3 revealed that…” And there are also some inappropriate expressions, for instance: “it is clearly evident…” Here, the connotation of two words——clearly and evident—— is definitely redundant.         

第二则

Communication is a typical “heterogeneous” field, more complicated than, say, library and information science, which is my field. Therefore, a citation and network analysis of this field could reveal useful information, helping us understand the field better.

There are a few places that the authors could improve upon.

First, the whole article is too long. For the readers of this journal, some concepts need not be explained in detail. For instance, the paragraph about the principle of MDS may be shortened.

Second,  “Discussion” part need to be strengthened greatly.

Just for instance, the authors assume that the classification by JCR is rational and make their analysis based on JCR classification. However, JCR classification is not perfect at all. For example, Public Understanding of Science and Science Communication are two journals very similar to each other, as known to all readers of these two journals. But, the former is classified into two categories:  Communication and History and Philosophy of Science, while the latter is classified as Communication only. I don’t see why.

Another example. The authors point out that the discipline of communication is influenced by psychology too much, leading to psychology bias. But they fail to analyze or even guess the possible reasons for this. I believe that such bias happen in many other heterogeneous fields, too. Library and information science has a strong computer science bias. Why? Because  heterogeneous fields tend to “yield” to other influencing fields that are “harder”  in terms of methodology, more “normal” in terms of discipline structure, and more convincing with more empirical data support.

Third, there are some inaccuracies. On page 4, it should be “On the one hand” rather than “In the one hand”.  On page 8, the authors say that SCI and SSCI are known as Web of Knowledge now. The more precise expression is “Web of Science” here, because Web of Knowledge also includes a lot of other databases, such as Derwent Patent database and LexisNexis database, etc.