Global Leaf Area Index Research over the Past 75 Years: A Comprehensive Review and Bibliometric Analysis

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The current review on “Global leaf area index research over the past 75 years: a comprehensive review and bibliometric analysis” by Ma et al. deals with the utilization of 75 years of data (1947-2021) from the Web of Science for scientific bibliometric analysis to derive the conclusions regarding development history, research hotspots, and application of LAI research and provide a reference for understanding the current situation and development trends of global LAI research. After careful reading, I found this manuscript interesting and suitable for publication in the Sustainability journal. However, I have some queries and suggestions to further strengthen the quality of the work. I suggest minor revision and my specific comments are:

1.      Introduction: line 32: vegetation is also an important part of the aquatic ecosystem. Please rephrase this line.

2.      Line 41: start it from a new paragraph.

3.      It is better to re-draw an outline chart from the data and methods to understand the approach and study selection criteria (change the color and font sizes or orientation of fig. 1)

4.      Table 4-5: Correct uppercase to normal.

5.      Table 6-8: Author – year and citations are missing.

6.      It is better to shift too big tables in supplementary files to reduce the length of the paper.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Global leaf area index research over the past 75 years: a comprehensive review and bibliometric analysis” (ID: sustainability-2195359). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our researches. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with approval. All revisions have been highlighted in red in the manuscript, so that editors and reviewers can be easily viewed the changes.The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewer’s comments are in the Word.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

In this article, the authors carry out an interesting bibliometric analysis on leaf area index (LAI) research over the past 75 years. But it is necessary to modify certain aspects:

 

(1) General considerations:

-Including an index (with the sections and subsections) and a list of abbreviations would make the manuscript easier to read.

-It is also necessary to improve the resolution of some figures: 1 and 10.

 

(2) Other aspects to consider are:

In the Abstract, in line 19: specify the five stages: incubation, cultivation…

-Page 10: line 391: remove bold in "Institutional distribution"

-Page 12: In table 4, include number of citations, in addition to the number of articles

-Page 14: Review table 5: 13,211 for "biology of global change" (in two rows??)

-On page 14-15: rewrite lines 509-510:

put the paragraph 517-523 before, in page 14, in line 509: “We ranked 51,324 authors, with 22,276 papers. A total of 785 independent authors published…in the field. The relevant information of the top authors was selected (table 6)…from China”.

-join the table 7 and 8 into one, change to horizontal orientation, if possible.

-In page 16, rewrite the paragraph from line 538, instead of describing the articles in order of citation, describe them in order of thematic affinity.

-in page 17, line 569: LAI (L)??

- on page 22 rewrite conclusions section: more direct and concise

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Global leaf area index research over the past 75 years: a comprehensive review and bibliometric analysis” (ID: sustainability-2195359). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our researches. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with approval. All revisions have been highlighted in red in the manuscript, so that editors and reviewers can be easily viewed the changes.The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewer’s comments are in the Word.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

- The article is very comprehensive, includes a large amount of data very carefully processed and, according to the title, should provide excellent information about the given issue. Above all, a general overview of the issue of publications focused on the use and application of the leaf area index (LAI) in various areas and disciplines is systematically processed. Statistical overviews are very systematic, it is interesting how many publications are devoted to this issue in many branches and scientific fields.

- The article provides a detailed analysis of the authors and publications that dealt with the given issue. It would be useful if the authors evaluated in detail the methods used for measurement, their development and recommended trends for future development, which can be expected thanks to the ever-evolving measurement technique and new possibilities for processing the results.

- In the article, I lack a more detailed analysis of the methods used for measurement and a more detailed treatment of the outlook and expected further trends in the development of methods of instruments and principles of the measurement of the leaf area index. It would also be very useful to process the outlook and future trends in various applications.

- It would be quite interesting to show in more detail which methods are most used for these various branches and to deduce from this what the further development of those measurement methods should be. It is a pity that not much attention is paid to the description of measurement methods. Perhaps it could be a topic for the authors of this publication where to focus their efforts to write other interesting publications and also for the industry that deals with this issue.

- On the formal side, I have only a few minor comments:

- There probably shouldn't be any references to citations in the Abstract (they have numbers in brackets...) (1), (2) etc. to (4)

- the article should be written in a neutral form, e.g. instead of as it is in the text on line 144 "To achieve our research aims, we proposed the following research questions [49]:"

it would be appropriate to write:  "In order to achieve the research objectives, the following research questions are addressed [49]:”

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Global leaf area index research over the past 75 years: a comprehensive review and bibliometric analysis” (ID: sustainability-2195359). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our researches. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with approval. All revisions have been highlighted in red in the manuscript, so that editors and reviewers can be easily viewed the changes.The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewer’s comments are in the Word.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx