Bibliometric Analysis of the Permafrost Research: Developments, Impacts, and Trends

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript has classified, summarized and analyzed a large number of published articles. The research on global permafrost is reviewed by the bibliometric method, and its evolution, current impact, and future research hotspots and directions are described in detail. The manuscript can understand the past developments, current status, and future trends of permafrost research. However, the manuscript and the presented interpretation have some flaws. I list below the issues requiring revision.

1. The manuscript is strongly recommended that authors find an English speaker with better technical background to carefully edit this manuscript;

2. Please add some information about the types of composition for the analyzed literature;

3. In discussion section, the authors provide some discussion on the strategy of literature search, but it is too general, if possible, please list some details as it can be a guide for similar studies to follow;

4. Please check some details of the article in detail. There are some places with extra spaces, especially between words and punctuation marks, such as in L156, " If current conditions continue to develop";

5. The fonts in Figure 3 (b) and Figure 12 are small, which makes reading difficult. It is recommended to enlarge them;

6. It is suggested to rewrite and reorganize the abstract and conclusion;

7. It is recommended to unify the format of references and select representative articles.

Author Response

All the figures have been corrected and the changes marked blue.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This study used bibliometric analysis method to review the research progress of permafrost since 1942, which was of great significance for related researchers to have an in-depth understanding of permafrost research. However, the topic and content of this manuscript are not very consistent with the scope of Remote Sensing. It lacks information on the use of remote sensing data, techniques, etc., to study permafrost. According to the author's manuscript, we know that there are about 500 articles related to remote sensing. It is suggested that the author add a section to elaborate on how remote sensing technology / data are applied to permafrost research or promote permafrost research.

1. L45: It is unnecessary to cite 6 literatures to explain the definition of permafrost, which may be overquoted.

2. L246: The authors only qualitatively described the exponential growth of the cumulative number of publications from 1942 to 2021, without giving the fitting relation and evaluation criteria.

3. Figure 2: There was a peak value in the number of annual articles published around 2003. Why? Have you tried to explore the reasons?

4. L268: It is obvious that the data in Figure 3a presents a nonlinear relationship and cannot be described by unitary linear regression. The authors can try piecewise description.

5. Figure 3b: The legend is blurred and cannot be seen clearly. Please redraw it. Figure 5 and 10 have the same problem.

6. L292-297: Why did the authors choose 2015? The sequence of research categories mentioned in L304-306 does not correspond to Figure 4.

7. L459-463: It's unnecessary to repeat that the top two authors have an H-index greater than 50.

8. In the section 3.3.5, is it necessary to elaborate on the content of each paper? Personally, I think a brief classification of these articles is enough.

Author Response

We corrected all the parts you mentioned. All the changes are marked in blue. The figures are clear to read.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

First of all, thanks to the authors for the work done, it was interesting to read the article.Edits are given as notes to the PDF file.

On what I would like to draw the attention of the authors:

1) The conclusions lack an analysis of Figure 11 – how keywords have changed with time. And it is one of the most interesting in the article and shows the direction of permafrost research.

2) Please make all the figures readable.

3) Please emphasize in the discussion that the analysis of publications from WoS reflects the visibility of research. There are much more permafrost studies conducted (at least in Russia), but their results are not presented in WoS core collection. 

 

Some comments (see PDF):

lines 27-28: should be edited

33-35: Why are these two particular topics listed here?

46-47: ice caps

48: 65% of Russia - so not almost half, but more than a half (2/3 of the area).

52: not the best word for permafrost; better just widespread 

55-57: edit (word "cryosphere" used too much times, see PDF)

59-60: edit

62-63: please check, this is definitely not the average value! maybe you meant 9 cm? Looks like a mistake

91: Note this review:

Kizyakov A.I., Leibman M.O. 2016. Cryogenic relief-formation processes: a review of 2010–2015 publications. Kriosfera Zemli (Earth’s Cryosphere), vol. XX, No. 4, pp. 40–52.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321003917_Cryogenic_relief-formation_processes_A_review_of_2010_2015_publications 

122: WOS usually abbreviated as WoS! Please change throughout the article

138-139: First mentioning, please provide a link 

 

279-281, Figure 3a: the linear approximation is not correct here - please leave only the number of articles or use another approximation.

Figure 3b: Please make this figure visible! It looks interesting, but it is not readable

390, Figure 7. Please at least cut a but this figure (the blue borders) to make the letters better visible 

436-439: See the notes to the figure in PDF. Some institutes are mentioned twice in different clusters. The earth cryopshere institute is mentioned twice in this figure. Russian academy of science includes most of russian institutes (melnikov permafrost inst, earth cryosphere inst and many others mentioned here), so it's strange to consider it separately 

Table 5, 7, 8 - please don't use caps, it's hard to read in this format

Figure 9: TC - total citations?

Figure 10: Please make the journal's name visible. Please correct "The Cryosphere" and the names of other journals (without points)

Figure 11: a very interesting figure! the only strange key word here is "pace". It's better to exclude it 

752-753: please incluse cluster names in the figure (as you name them in the text)

756-757: some keywords are just singular or plural and should have been considered together here: rock glacier and rock glaciers; peatland and peatlands. Especially since they are in the same cluster. Better fix it or the research looks sloppy

777: here are all the rest topics?

780: link to previous sentence

792: As a researcher from Russia i can say that a lot of papers are published in Scopus (Earth's Cryosphere https://www.scopus.com/sourceid/5000160401) and non-core WoS journals (https://ice-snow.igras.ru/jour), not taking into account journals in Russian. And permafrost occupies 66% of the russian territory, so we do have a lot of research conducted.  Please indicate somewhere that your paper shows the visibility of permafrost research. There can be good works of which no one know. And US is do 1st country in gaining high visibility to the conducted permafrost research. 

844-846: It' better not to generalize here. Three of them - Guido Grosse, Lutz Schirrmeister and Julia Boike, - are germans from AWI.  Please rewrite the conclusion (5) 

852: The exact name of this journal is  "The Cryosphere" (TC), please change it through the article

854-855: Please indicate the first authors and provide a hyperlinks, the DOI numbers don't give much information

858-862: This sentence doesn't looks like the main conclusion. It would looks better if you first add some conclusions above, like results of key words analysis. It's interesting at which years the keywords like permafrost thaw, permafrost degradation etc. arised and became frequently used (after 2010s), so we can see the effect of ongoing climate change on permafrost research. Wihout a broader conclusion this one looks like an attempt to link the research to an exact grant topic. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you very much for reviewing the manuscript, we have made all the corrections needed and we hope it will meet your expectations. Again, a lot of content on Russian permafrost research has been added to the revised manuscript. Once again, the images and tables have been processed to improve readability. Since the pdf is compressed for images, it may not be as clear as it is in the word. All changes are marked in blue.

Merry Christmas!

Author Response File: Author Response.docx