Search for the Developing Trends by Patent Analysis: A Case Study of Lithium-Ion Battery Electrolytes
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript "Search for the developing trendsby patent analysis: a case study of in lithium-ion battery electrolytes"
Is very interesting precise and innovative, I have a few questions though.
Some are barely formal:
3 (title) why "of in"? (and not only "of" or only in")
20 Why "these"? they are not mentioned earlier!
35 Why "The understanding the" and not "Understanding the" ?
40 "Shortened" respect to what?
119 perhaps "...for a company to the leader one..." sound better?
and one more fundamental question:
The study is mainly about the forward citation of patents in year 2005-2015 and it is done in 2019 so is the updating of the forward citation taken from historical data from 2015 or from nowadays? Further, the study claims to be predictive while the comparison of competence evaluation in the six major companies of the sector is retrospective. This is not cleared in any point of the manuscript. The temporal aspect is of major concern in predictions so it is unclear how the method could could be useful if actuated in the immediate. Also it is unclear how this method could interfere with research as the patent counting method should privilege established technologies and discoveries and be detrimental to investments in not yet established and more risky sectors because of the early stage of the studies. The Authors should therefore explain in an answer and/or better in the manuscript the time-frame of the use of the method.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear author,
Nice work! Please consider suggestions for revision of our interesting article.
I use the convention line number: comment in the following.
l. 29-30 do you men "... solid electrolyte interface (SEI) fil formED during ..."?
l. 35-36 : may be "vital" and necessary are excessive terms?
l. 74 "(MDS) is a mean" or "a way"?
l. 79 the goal of THIS study
l. 89-90 : do you mean tha the data was retreived only by using "Derwent Innovation" (I do not use it, sorry) and completed with information extracted from IP5 offices? this point is not clear and very important. As there is a very important disconvinience in you data. I could not check all your collected data, but, dealing with forward citation, I'm wondering. Your figure 3 in line 312 show patent US7083878B2 as the most cited. and US7223500B2 the less one in top 10. But if you consider google patent (that uses UPSTO) for those two patents you find respectively 42 95 forward citations. A huge difference with the 35 in your figure. Same problem for the US6958198B2 with 95 citations. If such differences. Using the espaceNet worldwide database one can check also differences with the data you provide. Hence, the quality of your top 10 patents can be discussed. Care in the conclusion proposed (l. 432-437). You should improve this by checking the data please. Secondly, forward citation count should, in my sense, be normalized with the age of the patent... A classical process in bibliometrics.
l 139 : why do you add +100 to the RPA as negative values shows relevant information and usefull for discrimination?
l 314: please jump the table title to the other page.
l. 351 : table 3 is very badly presented. Reduce the police to obtain a more readable table.
l. 386 : figure 5. What do the numbers represent (1639, 4550, 4205..)? Are those occurences of words?
ok for the rest aside the incidence of data gathering process explained above.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Great job,
in my point of view you should change police size in table 3.
Best,
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
