Bibliometric Analysis on Smart Cities Research

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper measures the relevance of research on "smart cities" by performing a bibliometrics analysis. The paper sheds light on some interesting facts, such as the bursts, co-authorship, and countries that have been publish more. 

The conclusions could be stronger: besides summarizing the content of the paper, what does this paper shows in terms of future trends, or trends that have been abandoned in the way? Short: how the results are relevant for scholars studying smart cities?

The figures seem complex but they are actually confusing. A statistical analysis would provide more information—if if you keep the figures as illustrations.

The text needs to be revised by a native speaker. It cannot be published as is.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer:

Thank you for your letter and for the reviewers’ comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Bibliometric Analysis on Smart Cities Research” (ID: sustainability-520249). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with approval.

Thanks again and Best wishes!

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a well-written submission. However, a few aspects of the paper should be improved in the interest of improving its quality as an academic paper.

First, re-write the abstract with a special emphasis on English (esp. second sentence; 'well-used'?; the main conclusions of:?; 'some inspirations'?; 'to do further investigations'? etc.)

Second, introduction could be improved a bit. You start with brief paragraph on the smart city phenomenon and then discuss bibliographic technique and again return to smart cities and finally end this section with your research objective. It would be more logical to concentrate on smart cities in the first few paragraphs, and then discuss your methodological view to this issue, and then come to the formulation of your research problem. It would be thus better if the paragraph between lines 61 to 71 is replaced to become the second paragraph of the intro (from the line 31 onwards). In addition, you should give a decent description of the concept of smart city and its major dimensions, for such a conceptualization helps to build a connection to the interest in applying bibliometric/-graphic method to this research field. There are plenty of illustrative definitions to choose from in the current literature.

Third, your problem formulation, methodology, and  analysis work fairly well. A technical issue worth mentioning is that Figure 3 is missing (at least in my print-out). It is referred to in text (line 137) but is not included in the manuscript.

Fourth, concluding section works well as a summary of this manuscript. In my opinion, second paragraph (lines 349 to 351) does not belong here. It is fragmentary piece of information, which would have value only if you discuss the annual publications and citations of smart city literature and present the estimation of the year 2019. It is just a minor detail (mentioned earlier, lines 122-126), that can be omitted from the concise concluding section.

Lastly, as there are a bit strange expressions and a few clumsy sentence structures here and there, the paper would benefit from language editing, most preferably by a professional native English-speaker.

Minor points or details:

- quite applicable? (line 35), content-wisely (line 44) etc.; this may be a matter of taste, but I would reconsider some of your wordings.

- In this thesis? (line 47)

- This is a minor point, but you mention some earlier concepts associated with the utilization of ICTs in urban development. Some of the terms never became mainstream (flexicity, telicity etc.), while you ignore such widely used terms as virtual city, cyber city, technocity and the like (lines 82-83)

- ... Smart city ... (line 83), why capital letter?

- In this study, key words were search between 1995 and 2019 (line 85). However, in Conclusion the period is from 1989 to 2019 (line 344)?

- In state 1, 4, 409 publications ... (line 90) [remove extra space]

- I think there is a mistake on line 226, as it refers to Figure 3(a). Do check!

- On line 354, ';(c) smart strategy for sustainable;' is there something missing here?

Author Response

Dear Editors and Reviewers:

Thank you for your letter and for the reviewers’ comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Bibliometric Analysis on Smart Cities Research” (ID: sustainability-520249). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with approval.

Thanks again and Best wishes!

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have improved the article substantially, with a clearer language and more meaningful insights. The paper contributes to the discussion of smart cities by organizing a bibliometrics analysis of the concept.