Current Status of Aged Public Buildings and Effect Analysis Prediction of Green Remodeling in South Korea
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Summary
This paper has the potential to make some important international contributions to the special edition. However, it should only be accepted after some major revisions. Many of my comments relate to writing style and the need for more content for the international academic community. To see examples of what I am suggesting, I recommend looking at some already published papers (in this journal but also venues like Energy Research and Social Science) to see examples of other papers (often opensource) that exhibit many of the features that I am recommending. Please see my comments below.
Academic argument
- While you set out the importance of your research, from a policy perspective – within South Korea and, to some extent on the international scale, you also need to consider in more depth international academic literature – particularly in relation to building performance. What areas of international academic literature are you going to contribute to, and potentially make new and original contributions to. Basically, I would like to see a succinct academic literature review early on in the paper.
- In terms of the significance and impact of your research – you state that ‘this study would be used as the basic data for planning the policy support measures in the second basic plan for green building (2020-2024) to promote green remodelling nationally.’ Lines 111-113. Can you expand upon this? Is their actual potential for this new research to contribute to the second plan for green building – if yes, say this and make more of it. If not, then say your research has the potential to increase understanding in this area, providing new empirical information that could be used to inform second plan for green building. Also, make sure you make clear what the name of this new plan is (if it is available).
- You need to improve the quality of the conclusion. At the moment, you only really summarise your findings. However, you need to consider the implications of your findings for the wider building, policy and particularly academic community. What implications do your findings have for the new building policy and building operators. More importantly, what contribution do your new findings make to existing internal literature. To account for this last point, please refer back to the improved literature presented and considered at the beginning of the paper. You also need to consider in your conclusion overall research limitations and opportunities for further research.
Methodology
- The paper jumps straight into describing the method that has been used in the research. The paper would benefit from a stronger justification of the method – this applies to each step of your methodology. You should do this by referring to other academic literature, referring to authors who have carried out similar work. As the method is also quite basic, you should also clearly describe the limitations of the approach and its potential for refinement in future research. Going through this process will set your approach on much firmer ground for an international academic audience.
- In addition, your sample size is quite small – you need to account for this
- You have decided to focus on office and educational buildings. You need to justify this choice and also consider differences between the respective asset categories.
Results
- From my point of view, you don’t need to show the reader what equipment you used – so remove Table 2
- Some of the formatting/alignment of your figures could be improved e.g. Figure 2
- Section 3.7 doesn’t really fit in the results section. I would advise discussion this in your conclusion when you discuss the implications of your findings.
Presentation
- In order to present your research in the best light, steps need to be taken to improve the written English for an international audience. For example, quite often sentences are too long and need to be broken down into more succinct prose. See line 30-33, 33-39, 59-64, 106-111 and 136-144. Basically, you need to avoid long passages of writing. Shorter sentences will improve the flow of righting and reduce the need for multiple types of punctuation.
- In general the manuscript needs a good proofread to remove typos/missing letter/choice of word etc eg line 59 should be ‘emphasizing’ not ‘emphasized.’ Improving this will really help the overall presentation of your research
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We thank you and the reviewers for giving us the opportunity to revise our manuscript entitled “Current status of aged public buildings and effect analysis prediction of green remodeling in South Korea”.
We appreciate the thoughtful comments, and Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
This study presents the steps needed for future remodeling, using the steps to actually carry out a study of the energy performance of an existing building, by examining the effects of building renovations and costs.
However, in order to improve the degree of completion of this research, we propose the following improvements.
- Detailed comments should be provided to improve the indoor environment and energy performance.
Please add the relevance of the results shown in Table 6 to Table 11.
- Supplement the credibility of the data with the annual energy cost reduction and additional construction cost description in Table 11.
- It seems that the U-value values of M12 and M15 in Table 9 are displayed abnormally. what is the reason?
- What is the creativity you seek to provide through the results of this study? Are there any differences from the case study?
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We thank you and the reviewers for giving us the opportunity to revise our manuscript entitled “Current status of aged public buildings and effect analysis prediction of green remodeling in South Korea”.
We appreciate the thoughtful comments, and Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The article presents the comprehensive study of public buildings, in which the emphasis is made not only on energy savings in buildings but also on health of the occupants. An economic analysis has been carried out, which showed feasibility of green remodelling projects.
As for the research methodology, its design and presentation of the results, I have no questions. But there are some small remarks:
1. There is a typo in the title of Figure 2, the "improvement elements" are repeated twice;
2. The article does not explain the abbreviation MEP (line 66);
3. For clarity, the costs of green remodeling could be given not in the national Korean currency, but in USD. But this is at the discretion of the authors.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We thank you and the reviewers for giving us the opportunity to revise our manuscript entitled “Current status of aged public buildings and effect analysis prediction of green remodeling in South Korea”.
We appreciate the thoughtful comments, and Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
This manuscript has been greatly improved and is approaching publishable quality. Improvement can still be made though.
In order to this, improvements need to be made to the written format of the paper. Please carefully proofread the paper and remove typos and English language problems. I know it is challenging to write in a second language, and painful when reviewers pick up on this. However, I think a few small improvements will really improve your paper. I have noted a few of these issues below.
All abbreviations need to be expressed in full in the first instance – eg BAU line 32, SOC line 170, GR Process line 176
Some of your sentences are still too long – e.g. lines 45-50. This needs broken down into smaller sentences. This will then improve the readability of the paper.
Typo line 69
Line 126 – in-text referencing error e.g. should just be Sebi
Line 244 – Nat Saving analysis – is this a typo?
Line 254 – typo – this sentence does not read well in English
Line 460 – should this be South Korea?
Line 463 – remove ‘and’
Line 581-582 – should this sentence ‘Because it showed a tendency’ be there – is this a fragment that hasn’t been deleted?
In addition, you should also concentrate on the following,
It would be beneficial/strengthen your manuscript if you could show how your method is based on methods used by other authors? Eg you have centred your research in the international literature. It would also be good if you could add more literature to substantiate your method. Please do this at the beginning of the method section.
Line 107-109 – this is a grand statement. Are you really going to directly inform the second basic plan for green buildings (2020-2024). Or are you going to help inform the knowledge base for the second basic plan for green buildings. Basically, you need to be careful that you don’t claim too much, you have to be circumspect in relation to the impact of your paper.
Just before the literature review section, I would recommend inserting a short paragraph detailing what the rest of the paper is about. EG the next section will present a literature review, which…Followed by a methodology that will…
In your method or conclusion, you need to comment on the difference between office buildings and educational buildings. These buildings have distinct attributes, design features and use.
Also, in your conclusion. I think you could offer a little more in terms of how your new research contributes to international literature and opportunities for further research, especially in South Korea – which is an under researched location.
Author Response
Thank you for the additional careful comment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for resolving the questions of the reviewers.
Thank you for presenting valuable research results.
Author Response
We will try to submit a more meaningful research paper next time.
Once again, thanks for your kind comments.
