英文论文审稿意见（2）

武夷山

第一则

2013年1月24日

Although short, this paper makes a quite comprehensive summary about the significance and possible problems related to altmetrics. Therefore, it is worth publishing and I believe that readers could draw meaningful insight from this paper.

I think that the paper could be further improved by strengthening discussion about the two points:

(1) The present discussion about efficiency is very brief. It could and should be elaborated a bit. For example, the authors could emphasize that in order to use efficiency indicators in evaluation practice properly, large enough time window should be considered. Many maga-projects, such as LAMOST project in China, take many years to finish after the investment is made. So if we evaluate the institute taking charge for the building of LAMOST by overly simplistic input/output analysis, then this institute would be rated unfavorably. Another case is that I recently read a paper published in a 2011 issue of Intelligence magazine and this investigation utilized a British longitudinal study initiated in 1958 and continued until today! Such longitudinal studies would benefit many generations of scholars later but they are easy to get disadvantageous evaluation score if inappropriate efficiency indicators are adopted carelessly.

(2) The authors claim that “real scientific progress can only be acknowledged by peers”. This is true, but I think a more precise expression is preferred. I said that mainly because quantitative evaluations have entered our daily life more and more frequently, so much so that when an expert is asked to evaluate academic performance of a scientist, a research group, a university or a country, he or she makes evaluation decision partly based on the quantitative bibliometrics indicators he or she met before but without realizing this  himself or herself. In another word, in the current world, there is no pure, objective expert opinion any more. Apparent expert opinions are intertwined with some former quantitative evaluation results “seamlessly”.  

第二则

2013年2月5日

This manuscript provides some new information. However, the authors have plenty for improvement.

1.  Clearer argument

For instance, they said they had made expert consultation. How many experts have they consulted? What are the qualifications of those experts? In addition to helping the authors to categorize the papers, did they find the results surprising? Or this exercise just yielded results that are common sense for those agricultural experts?

They compared China with 4 other countries. Why were these 4 English-speaking countries chosen? They failed to give any reason. In fact, agriculture of France seems to be more representative of Europe than UK (the authors used “England” inappropriately).

They listed the items when China share is over 9.15% in a table. Why 9.15% rather than， say， 10%?  9.15% seems a very arbitrary threshold.

2.  Better grammar

I suggest that authors seek help from a professional English-editing company. The current version contains too many grammatical errors. Just a few examples:

Has being become →(this symbol means “should change into”)has become

Could be as →could be

Expert consultant→expert consultation(in Fig. 1 )

criterions→criteria

norelevant→non-relevant

application researches→applied research

3.  More careful proofreading

For instance, “to be set” is mistakenly written as “ to bet set”.