The Diseases and Pests of Rubber Tree and Their Natural Control Potential: A Bibliometric Analysis
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript “The diseases and pests of rubber tree and their natural control potential: A bibliometric analysis” aimed “to understand the foreign and domestic attention to the field of diseases and pests in rubber tree by quantitatively analyzing institutions, major countries, the annual publication volume, and their network cooperation relationships.” The study is generally quite well performed, but it is obvious that a comprehensive linguistic revision by a native English speaker is necessary to improve the readability of the text. This reviewer is not a native English speaker and will therefore focus on scientific matters in commenting.
Specific comments:
L80 “We defined which country an article is from by its corresponding author’s country…..” I understand that this definition allows to consider the contribution of non-rubber producing countries, but I find it a bit arbitrary as it masks the study site location – the high proportion of French studies is cryptic. I would propose that you group the studies based on the site location.
Figure 2 legend. Add all the details needed for a reader to understand the content.
Figure 1 and 3. There would appear to be an inconsistency between the number of papers between the two figures as fig. 3 shows a considerably higher number of studies.
Table 2. Add the scientific name of the causative agent. Use only 1 decimal for citation number.
Table 3. Is this table needed as comparable data are shown in fig. 5?
Fig. 6. Is this fig. needed as comparable data are shown in fig. 5?
Fig. 7. Is this fig. needed as comparable data are shown in fig. 8?
Fig. 8 legend. Add all the details needed for a reader to understand the content.
L243. Should read “differential expression”
Fig. 9. Change the subheading “Induced by biofertilizers” embedded in the figure to “Induced by biofertilizers/biocontrol agents” or “Induced by mycorrhizal fungi/biocontrol agents”
Figure 5 legend. Add all the details needed for a reader to understand the content.
L261 “leaf fungal hosts”. Write “fungal leaf pathogens”
L487 These are bacterial endophytes.
General comment on discussion. This is the most interesting part of the study for a person dealing with rubber tree diseases. It is a bit long and some condensing would improve the general readability.
While the text is understandable, it requires a comprehensive linguistic revision by a native English speaker, preferrably one who also is familiar with the specific scientific terminology related to the various aspects included.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
There are serious flaws in the Materials and Methods part. The Boolean search performed is not clear at all. The authors stated that they have used the following keywords for literature search:
“rubber tree”, “rubber plant”, “Hevea brasiliensis”, “disease”, “pathogen”, “bacteria”, “fungi”, “pest”, “infect”, “resistance”, “defence”, 72“management” and “control”
What was the exact expression? Which wildcards do they use (AND, OR, NOT)?
It is not stated at all.
It is mentioned that the duplicates were removed. Do they remove it manually or used a software to do that?
The authors stated that the literature before 1991 year was not included because the abstracts were missing.This does not make any sense to me.
It is stated that book chapters, conference papers, meeting abstracts were removed. I think they should be included. What about the review papers?
But the main problem with the study is the data extraction part. It does not make any sense to me because it is not clearly described and it looks like it has lots of flaws.
The manuscript needs to be edited by a native speaker.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Thank you for the opportunity to review a paper written by Chen and colleagues. Please find below my comments:
[General]
1. I do not think the bibliometric analysis article fits the review criteria as it contains material and methods. And moreover, the study itself has its own research question. Therefore, I suggest the manuscript to be published as ‘Article’ not ‘Review’.
[Title]
1. “their natural control potential” Seems like wrong, consider: “their potential natural control”?
[Abstract]
1. Provide the number of records (papers), total-link-strength, and number of occurrences in the abstract.
2. Provide the database used for the bibliometric (WoS, PubMed, or Scopus?).
[Introduction]
1. It is of importance to highlight how useful the bibliometric is by presenting previous research such as:
a. Chiari et al., Polymers 2022;14(16):3297
b. Zulkifli et al., Narra X 2023; 1(1): e80
2. “extracted from the Web of Science-SCIE database” please provide justification as to why authors used this database.
[Methods]
1. Authors performed the search in 2022. I would suggest authors to update the search to 2023. I believe the change would not be much.
2. “441 papers” is considered too low… Please consider using a better keyword combination. If that’s not possible, please explain why the number is low (such as the topic received currently received a little attention).
3. Data analysis should be provided in much more details. Step-by-step of using the software should be provided. Software identity such as the version and company/institution releasing the software should be provided as well.
4. Calculation for average publication year and average citations should be provided.
5. How clustering of the keyword was performed should be stated here.
[Results]
1. Figure 1. “Number of publications” consider using capital ‘N’ in the y-axis.
2. Figure 2 has different connecting line thickness. Please explain in the caption what the thickness of the connecting line represent about.
3. Pay attention on the legend of figure 3.
4. Figure 4. Please add labels for each segment (left, center, and right). Also, what does the year (2008—2019) mean in the most right segment of the graph.
5. Table 3. Please consider to use capital in the first letter of the word such as Appressorium formation or Vegetative growth
6. For figure 7 and 8, minimum number of co-occurrence should be stated in the caption.
The writing is easy to follow. But moderate English editing might be required.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
I could not find the authors' response to my earlier comments, something that would have been useful in understanding the extent to which the authors agree og disagree with the feedback. While quite some changes have been made, some of my prior comments have not been followed. This in itself is not a problem but I would like to see the argument for not following the advice. For example, I commented that the figure legends need to be self-explanatory - now the reader still needs to consult the text in relation to some figures to be able to read the figure. This is not acceptable.
While the authors have made some revision of the English language, the text as a whole is not fully fluent. As a non-native English speaker I do appreciate the challenges in writing in English. While the text is understandable, many sentences do not read fully well and in many instances the phrases used appear odd. As an example, the sentence in Line 33-35 "Rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) is perennial crop originating from Amazon and has been spread to show real development across the tropical belt in order to supply natural rubber production around the world [1]." Personally I would write, e.g. "Rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis), a perennial crop originating from Amazon, has been widely cultivated across the tropical belt in order to supply the global demand [1]." There are very many such sentences in the text that would benefit from rephrasing and I simply cannot afford the time to propose alternative phrasing. Please engage a native English speaker for this task.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The requested revisions were not provided in detail. The language of the manuscript also requires extensive editing. When I checked your search in WoS with the related keywords the first publication dates back to 1980, not to 1900.
Besides, there are over 2000 publications not about 600.
There are serious flaws in the Materials and Methods of this study.
The current revised format doesn't address the concerns raised before.
I don't think that the authors have appropriate expertise in how to conduct a bibliometric analysis.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Authors have improved the manuscript. I have no more concerns for this submitted manuscript - it can be accepted.
Check again for minor grammatical or typing error.
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 3 Comments
We would like to thank you for taking the time to review our manuscript. We sincerely appreciate all suggestions and comments, which helped us to improve the quality of our manuscript. We are so glad to hear from you that it can be accepted.
We have checked again for grammatical or typing error as you suggested.
Round 3
Reviewer 1 Report
The revised version is a clear improvement in relation to prior versions. But the language is, from time to time, not always as fluent as it could be. While I am not a native speaker, I tried to help the authors a bit and provide quite a few linguistic revision proposals to further improve the readability - see the attached file. I do not believe my proposals tackle all the possible phrases that would benefit from reassessment but it is a good orientation basis, I hope.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
See above
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you so much for your patience and your valuable feedback. We appreciate you for your precious time in revising our manuscript. The linguistic revision proposals you have provided help a lot to improve the readability of our manuscript. We have incorporated all your corrections in our revision version. We have also carefully considered the comments and try to follow your orientations by checking sentence and reediting. We will continue to try our best to meet the language requirement.
Sincerely,
Liqiong Chen, PhD
Reviewer 2 Report
Provide more information regarding bibliometric analysis and the methods within this approach. Discuss further these techniques within the Discussion part. You can refer to and cite the following literature:
Akın, M., Bartkiene, E., Özogul, F., Eyduran, S. P., Trif, M., Lorenzo, J. M., & Rocha, J. M. (2023). Conversion of Organic Wastes into Biofuel by Microorganisms: A Bibliometric Review. Cleaner and Circular Bioeconomy, 100053.
Akin, M., Eyduran, S. P., & KRAUTER, V. (2023). Food Packaging Related Research Trends in the Academic Discipline of Food Science and Technology: A Bibliometric Analysis. Cleaner and Circular Bioeconomy, 100046.
Provide a flowsheet of the bibliometric study performed. Add a table of 10 most cited articles ordered by total citation, total citation per year indicating the publisher as well.
What is the average publication percentage over the years (indicate)?
Provide a Figure of the Core Sources according to Bradford's Law, please.
Provide also a network analysis results demonstrating the most active countries, institutions, and authors' networks.
Moderate editing of English language required
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
