英文论文评审意见汇总（5）

武夷山

第一则

20160318

This is a bold exploration in scientometric evaluation and should be applauded. However, there are a few things that need to be discussed further.

1. Appropriateness of using Cobb-Douglas Production Function.

Usually in this function, y is the product and x are contributing resources. In the case of the manuscript, International Collaboration is definitely a resource contributing to internationality, while SNIP (Source-Normalized Impact per Paper) is not one, since for a database consisted of all domestic journals and none of international journals, we could still compute SNIP based on the database. It seems  that in the authors’mind, internationality is equal to high quality, therefore they take SNIP as a contributor.

2. Over emphasis upon the importance of non-local influence.

For a small discipline with a very small science community, it is quite normal that there are very few journals in this small field and many scientists would publish their articles and cite other articles in the same best journal of their field. In this case, although this journal has a weak non-local influence, it does not mean that this is a poor quality journal. In fact I knew such a case where Thomson Reuters “suppressed” a journal title from appearing in the JCR list just because it has a low non-local influence (although they did not use this term). Later, after the chief editor of this journal provided a strong self-defense argument, Thomson Reuters “releases” that journal. I suggest the author separate the “discussion” section from the current last section and provide more discussions about limitations of this study.

3. Failure to explain things as they should.

For instance, the authors failed to tell readers why they only crawl journals that are older than 3 years and younger than 5 years.

I also hope that the authors could explain in more detail how they have done in data cleansing. Just for example, many authors would attach more than one affiliations upon their names (e.g. a visiting scholar temporarily working in USA might attach both his or her current American affiliation and his or her home country affiliation). If the authors of this manuscript find that two affiliations belonging to two countries appear in the byline, and identifies it as a case of international collaboration, then a misunderstanding might have occurred. 

 4. Some English expression could be improved.

     Just a few examples:

(1). “They do not generally do not impact the results of author or journal queries much, if at all”should be “They  generally do not impact the results of author or journal queries much, if at all.”

(2)“Google Scholar is an incomprehensible storehouse with uninhibited accessible” should be “Google Scholar is an incomprehensible storehouse with uninhibited access”.

(3)“differentiate between number of survey and original research article citations of a journal” should be “differentiate between number of review  and original research article citations of a journal”.

第二则

20160822

This is an interesting Opinion Paper. I recommend to accept it.

The authors could further refine their discussion by using more cautious statements, because their current judgment is based on the speculation rather than the sociological survey data. For instance, a possible reason for a signatory to publish a revised manuscript in Elsevier journal after signing the petition might be the fact that he or she has no right to coerce other coauthors to boycott at this moment. Therefore the authors had better (maybe for their next contribution) add up a new analysis----just collect data on single-author papers by those signatories. Since the number of single-author papers is not large for sure, all disciplines could be covered instead of only Chemistry and Psychology. In this case, one could easily and correctly judge whether the signatories break their words or not.  

By the way, since the number of signatories is not large enough in comparison with the total number of potential authors in the world ( more and more of authors will come from emerging economies and developing countries) , even all the signatories abide by their commitment, the actual impact upon powerful publishers like Elsevier would always be pitiful. My another suggestion is to analyze the status of “developed country” or “developing country” of signatories, and my guess is that majority of them are from the latter.

On line 100,  is “not unsurprising” correct expression? Or should it be “ not surprising”?