英文论文评审意见汇总（8）

武夷山

20171031

1.      The authors want to penalize the malpractice in citation behavior, which is a laudable attempt. However, this work needs not relate the journal internationality with penalty scores. For instance, for journals of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the internationality should not become a criterion for their quality or impact. But for these TCM journals or other journals with strong local tint that do not necessarily emphasize internationality, unethical citations also occur. It seems to me that the authors have tried to do too many things in just one article, which would confuse readers. It would be a better choice if they are willing to focus on just one task, say how to penalize the citation malpractice.

2.      In penalizing the citation malpractice, the most difficult part is to decide the thresholds or boundary values, as the authors have realized. Without suitable thresholds, one might wrong the evaluated journals or authors inappropriately. The proper procedure to yield such thresholds is more important, and more worthwhile a job, than all those algorithms that the authors spent so much time to deal with.

3.      What is more, how could one know which citations belong to cognizant citation or genealogy citation, which ones are not? To find the truth in this regard requires sociological study rather than one or more algorithms.

If the authors accept my comment, they could make a major revision by focusing on a smaller topic and by answering my doubts above.

In terms of linguistic aspect, I remind the authors to carefully check their use, or lack of use,  of commas, especially when appositive appears. The following is just a few examples.

Page 3, line 7:

“the father of Impact Factor has been criticized, unfairly and relentlessly”

should change as “the father of Impact Factor, has been criticized unfairly and relentlessly”.

P3

Therefore, models are required to be defined, built and used to compute internationality score of

an author or a journal. Since, some of the "popular yet prone to gaming" metrics can’t be used, the problem needs a few novel metrics. These metrics are termed suitably as "greed-aware" metrics.

The above paragraph does not refer to “the problem” any more, so the bullet point before “Therefore” should be deleted, and one should restart a paragraph here.

P4, line 23

“local influence is equivalent to journals or authors, receiving citations from friendly network”

is better changed as “local influence refers to the fact that journals or authors  receive most of their citations from friendly network”, because “influence” is never equals to “journals or authors”.