Knowledge Mapping Analysis of Rural Landscape Using CiteSpace

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article provides an interesting analysis of the scientific literature on Rural Landscape Research (RLR) by using CiteSpace, an innovative and well-designed knowledge mapping tool that allows to overcome some of the most common limitations of the mainstream bibliometric analysis. The authors structured the article in a very interesting and communicative way, by showing the main limitations and strengths of the method, but also showing the key research frontiers and trending topics on RLR based on more than 7,500 scientific articles.

Below some comments and suggestions to improve both contents and editing of the paper.

Contents:

Section 3.1.2: since the interdisciplinary approach is a key aspect of RLR, additional thoughts and a more exhaustive discussion could be added in this section, by better showing the key results on the relations amongst disciplines. Section 3.1.3: it would be interesting to shows and discuss the disciplines to which refer/belong the key authors cited. Section 3.1.4: additional explanations on the key results should be added on the reasons of the presence of an high number of papers in few countries as well as the high betweenness centrality (e.g., the different interests and values given by institutions and citizens to landscapes, the development of the infrastructures, the level of research centres that allow scientists located in such countries to publish in peer reviewed journals, the higher connections amongst universities etc..) Sections from 3.2.1 to 3.2.5. I acknowledge the effort of the authors and the intense reading necessary to draft this part. Nevertheless, I am struggling to see the added value of such sections, for two reasons. The first one is that a detailed analysis of the contents of the key papers for each topic seems beyond the scope of the article. The second one is that the topics discussed are so broad and complex that it is difficult to synthesise the key issues in an effective way in only two pages. The authors could add just a short explanation of the different topics and approaches under figure 5, without trying to discuss in detail the key results of key studies.

Editing issues

Line 43, reference [8]: substitute “Rigolon and Alessandro” with Rigolon (Alessandro is his name) Please, check the references section: there are several mistakes, typos and several articles are not cited in the correct way. In the first part of the paper there are several repetitions: I read several times in different sections that the first paper on RLR was published in 1936 and that the time span considered in the study was from 1936 to 2018.

Author Response

Responses to Reviewer 1 Comments

 

We would like to thank you for your efforts in reviewing our manuscript and providing many insightful comments and suggestions. Those comments are all valuable and helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have carefully studied your comments and suggestions very carefully and have revised the manuscript accordingly. The details are explained below; the number of the response corresponds with the number of your comment.

 

Point 1: Section 3.1.2: since the interdisciplinary approach is a key aspect of RLR, additional thoughts and a more exhaustive discussion could be added in this section, by better showing the key results on the relations amongst disciplines.

 

Response 1: Thank you for your advice. As you said, this section needs to have more details about interdisciplinary connections. We have added some sentences to describe the relationship between the main disciplines and other interdisciplinary disciplines in our paper as follows:

 

In addition, according to the intensity value of the connection lines, environmental sciences & ecology has strong connection with similar fields such as environmental studies, and also has close interdisciplinary relationships with other subjects such as geography, urban study, public administration, agriculture, and social sciences, among others.

 

Point 2: Section 3.1.3: it would be interesting to shows and discuss the disciplines to which refer/belong the key authors cited.

 

Response 2: To show the disciplines of key authors is a good way to fit the theme. This information has been added in the new revision. The content is as follows:

 

Their academic backgrounds include agriculture, environmental geography, ecology, agricultural sociology, landscape ecology, etc, showing the interdisciplinary relationships.

 

Point 3: Section 3.1.4: additional explanations on the key results should be added on the reasons of the presence of an high number of papers in few countries as well as the high betweenness centrality (e.g., the different interests and values given by institutions and citizens to landscapes, the development of the infrastructures, the level of research centres that allow scientists located in such countries to publish in peer reviewed journals, the higher connections amongst universities etc..)

 

Response 3: This suggestion is very helpful and reasonable. We have added to the explanations on the key results an additional paragraph as follows：

 

Most of the high volume of publications and high-betweenness centrality values were found in European countries, in addition to the similar natural and geographical environment that makes European countries form strong research links. European countries' alliances and organisations on landscape research, as well as the formulation and promulgation of some conventions and policies, have important significance for the research and development of rural landscapes and have been widely used for reference. These include The European Landscape Convention of the Council of Europe, which promotes the protection, management, and planning of the landscapes and organises international co-operation on landscape issues.

 

Point 4: Sections from 3.2.1 to 3.2.5. I acknowledge the effort of the authors and the intense reading necessary to draft this part. Nevertheless, I am struggling to see the added value of such sections, for two reasons. The first one is that a detailed analysis of the contents of the key papers for each topic seems beyond the scope of the article. The second one is that the topics discussed are so broad and complex that it is difficult to synthesise the key issues in an effective way in only two pages. The authors could add just a short explanation of the different topics and approaches under figure 5, without trying to discuss in detail the key results of key studies.

 

Response 4: Thank you very much for seeing our efforts in analysing this part. In fact, we have read nearly 600 articles in order to write this paper. We have picked up many new things and tried to sort out the content. Due to the limitation of article length, we apologize for not explaining this part well. However, the suggestions you gave us were nevertheless helpful. We abandoned the original method and adopted a simple introduction and preferred the analysis of state rather than more specific content. Please see the new revision. Again, thank you for your consideration. 

 

Point 5: Editing issues. Line 43, reference [8]: substitute “Rigolon and Alessandro” with Rigolon (Alessandro is his name) Please, check the references section: there are several mistakes, typos and several articles are not cited in the correct way. In the first part of the paper there are several repetitions: I read several times in different sections that the first paper on RLR was published in 1936 and that the time span considered in the study was from 1936 to 2018.

 

Response 5: We apologize for such an oversight. We did find problems with some references, so we have revised the entire reference format again. The 1936 does appear repeatedly in the manuscript and we have briefed it.

 

In addition, other revisions we made include the following:

We have made major changes to section 3.3 of our article to supplement the content of discussion. Because of the comprehensiveness of the last research path formed by clustering, we finally decided not to analyse it after careful consideration. Both abstracts and conclusions have additional content regarding the purpose and value of our research. The English of this article has been adjusted by the author and professional institutions. The format of the existing errors has also been modified.

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper entitled “Knowledge Mapping Analysis of Rural Landscape Research Using CiteSpace” is an interesting work that provide a bibliographic research while furnishing interpretations and analysis in the research area of rural landscape research.

The paper has some mistakes here and there, sometimes with bad sentencing using unproper vocabulary. Therefore I strongly suggest to work for an extensive English editing of this work.

To what concern the structure, I don’t have any substantial remark: the paper is easy-to-understand and clearly explained. The utilization of CiteSpace is adequately introduced and the research query are highlighted as long as the produced results.

Nonetheless, this contribution presents a general and vague discussion because the field of investigation is too broad: rural landscape research is, in fact, a too broad research area where a lot of different view and methodologies are gathered (think about ecosystem services, land use changes, landscape evolution. Ad the approaches: theoretical? Analytical? Measurement – Metrics? And so on…).

This vagueness is due to the fact that there is no research question in this work (not in the abstract, nor in the introduction). Why are you analysing this? What do you want to demonstrate? If the work want to deal with policies maybe it was better to cut the research around a specific word…

This problem affects seriously the discussion section, which seems to be an introduction rather that a discussion of the findings… please consider that presenting the ranking by CiteSpace is not enough to say anything relevant… indeed in this section it is expected that you are able to sum up briefly a novel concept, or the emerging research paradigms, not a general overview of a classification.

So I strongly suggest you to cut your research around a research question, and then discuss the evolution of the concept using bibliography…

For detailed comments see the file.

 

Good luck!

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Responses to Reviewer 2 Comments

 

We would like to thank you for your efforts in reviewing our manuscript and providing many insightful comments and suggestions. These comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper.

 

We are aware of the problem you mentioned and have also had trouble with it. The original intention for doing this research is because our team has been focusing on rural landscape for more than ten years. In particular, the promulgation of the principle of rural landscape as heritage in 2017 to show that rural landscape is becoming more and more precious. We hope to find out the status of the overall research on rural landscapes in the world. The review is the best way to understand what scholars are doing, what the current hotspots are, who the key authors are, and what new research trends exist. However, we were unable to find this information as all we could find was some very specific summary content. We know that this is an ambitious and difficult task because the field of rural landscape research is too wide; the more than 7,000 articles we searched are just a fragment of the research. Nevertheless, we decided to try to do this work; instead of trying to analyse it from a very specific perspective, we used a bibliometric perspective. We conducted professional bibliometric training and tool learning for this analysis and read nearly 600 articles on the matter. The tool Citespace, especially for large data literature samples, has a good presentation result. In the process of analysis, we did gain something. First, we got the answers to the basic questions we formulated, such as: the research organization, author distribution, and connections between authors, and the basic content of rural landscape research. Secondly, it is more critical that we obtain clusters through Citespace co-citation cluster analysis and determine the core clusters based on S and Q values. The software also automatically forms a list of articles with intermediary centrality ranking and gives an important reference for the intensive reading of the literature. We believe this is a more scientific approach to literature screening for large literature samples. The five research fronts we have extracted can provide scholars with in-depth research references. Indeed, this article has many shortcomings and limitations, and we will also be eager to conduct further research based on some valuable information provided by this article.

 

We have studied your comments and suggestions very carefully and have revised the manuscript accordingly. The details are explained below, where the number of the response corresponds with the number of your comment. But for more detailed modification information, please check the new revision. Thank you for your consideration. 

 

Point 1: The paper has some mistakes here and there, sometimes with bad sentencing using unproper vocabulary. Therefore I strongly suggest to work for an extensive English editing of this work.

 

Response 1: We are very sorry for the appearance of some incorrect words and formats. We have also modified it based on your comments and found professional institutions to edit in English. The format of the existing errors has also been modified.

 

Point 2: Nonetheless, this contribution presents a general and vague discussion because the field of investigation is too broad: rural landscape research is, in fact, a too broad research area where a lot of different view and methodologies are gathered (think about ecosystem services, land use changes, landscape evolution. Ad the approaches: theoretical? Analytical? Measurement – Metrics? And so on…).

 

Response 2: Thank you for your advice. Due to the limitation of article length, we apologise for not explaining this well, especially section 3.2 Themes and fields of rural landscape research. The suggestions you gave us were indeed helpful. We have abandoned the original method and adopted a simple introduction and preferred the analysis of state rather than more specific content. Please see the new revision.

 

Point 3: This vagueness is due to the fact that there is no research question in this work (not in the abstract, nor in the introduction). Why are you analysing this? What do you want to demonstrate? If the work want to deal with policies maybe it was better to cut the research around a specific word…

 

Response 3: We acknowledge that we did not answer the research questions well. The main reason that we did this research was because the summary of the basic survey of rural landscape research is still blank. We hope to learn more about the overall view of rural landscape research from the perspective of bibliometrics. Furthermore, we propose a large theme and vast number of literature samples to analyse paths and provide quantitative methods for further precision literature screening and future research. We have added descriptions of research questions to the abstract and introduction. Please see the new revision.

 

Point 4: This problem affects seriously the discussion section, which seems to be an introduction rather that a discussion of the findings… please consider that presenting the ranking by CiteSpace is not enough to say anything relevant… indeed in this section it is expected that you are able to sum up briefly a novel concept, or the emerging research paradigms, not a general overview of a classification.

 

Response 4: We are aware of this problem you mentioned and found that this problem is especially apparent in section 3.3. Therefore, we have adjusted the full text, especially the conclusions and discussions to strengthen the discussion. Please see the new revision. Again, thank you for your consideration. 

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I see that authors adjusted here and there the manuscript according to the reviewer’s notes.
I don’t have any further concern on this work which I confirm to be well-written, easy-to-understand and presented in a straightforward manner.
The structure is well presented, and the discussion focuses on research results.
I insist that the research area is too broad from my point of view, and main novelties for this huge bibliographic reviews comes to form the selection and specialization on a single issue, or the relation of a research area within some specific matters (e. g. Search how much of the theoretical landscape research is based on real case of studies… in this case, you use the bibliographic references to find a couple of relevant documents, and then you move into a documental analysis…).
In any case, this can be an issue for further research development.

See that you have to adjust some minor mistakes here and there (attached files).

Good luck.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Many thank you for your efforts in reviewing our revisions again, and for your support of our revisions.

These comments are always very helpful for revising and improving our paper, and we have adjusted the format of the entire article again based on your comments, please check the new revision in the attachement.

Again, thank you for your consideration.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf