Knowledge Development Trajectories of the Radio Frequency Identification Domain: An Academic Study Based on Citation and Main Paths Analysis

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you to the authors for submitting this well written paper, also to the editor for inviting me to read it.

The abstract is well written, engaging, and contains all key elements, I particularly liked the inclusion of the usefulness of the findings, authors often miss this important information in their abstract.

The introduction provides an interesting historical account of RFID technology. The authors also provide a very good discussion of the value of the technology. This section could be improved by including definitions of key terms, and scope the paper, also strengthen the reasons why this research is worth doing, which is different to the value of the technology.

The authors have used several well known approaches which are clearly explained, some validation is offered, this could be further strengthened. Some minor additions could also strength this work, for example why was the WOS database selected, why were the year spans selected?

Table 1 provides a useful summary of journal rankings for the reader. The authors categorise the papers in to 6 sections, each providing a descriptive review of the key papers. It is not totally clear how the 6 sections were derived. This could be clearly explained.

Figure 6 provides some really interesting information, but I feel its usefulness is diminished as the font is to small and detracts from the reader's visibility. Figure 7 is provides a very interesting model of the relationships between the various sectors identified. I think if the authors changed the layout of this page to landscape the connections would be easier to read. I think some additional discussion around this Figure its purpose, and application, would also benefit the reader. Figure 8 and its accompanied discussion support the author's conclusion that the RFID topic remains popular and is continuing to develop.

The conclusion is well written providing a neat summary of the key ideas of the paper, recommendations are also included and implications of those.

This is a nicely written paper with some minor updates will be very valuable to researchers in this field.

Author Response

Ms. Lili Chen

Editor

MDPI applied sciences

.

2021-SEP.01

 

Dear Dr. Lili Chen

Re: Document reference No. applsci-1360020

 

 

Please find attached a revised version of our document “Knowledge Development Trajectories of the Radio Frequency Identification Domain: An Academic Study Based on Citation and Main Paths Analysis”. We would like to resubmit for publication as a(n) original Article in MDPI applied sciences/Special Issues /Data_Mining_Business_Domains.

 

Your comments and those of the reviewers were highly insightful and enabled us to improve the quality of our document. In the following pages are our responses to each comment from the reviewer(s) as well as your own comments.

 

Revisions in the text are shown yellow highlights. We hope that our revisions to the document combined with our accompanying responses will be sufficient to render our document suitable for publication in MDPI Applied Sciences.

 

 

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

                                                                                                         

Yours sincerely,

 

Mr. Su   Ph. D. Candidates, D&G General Manager

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Open Review2

1. The abstract is well written, engaging, and contains all key elements, I particularly liked the inclusion of the usefulness of the findings, authors often miss this important information in their abstract.

Ans: Abstract: add the explanation for usefulness in manuscript by yellow mark

• After clustering into groups, the results are twenty clusters, and six clusters with citation counts of more than 200 were obtained.

 

2. The introduction provides an interesting historical account of RFID technology. The authors also provide a very good discussion of the value of the technology. This section could be improved by including definitions of key terms, and scope the paper, also strengthen the reasons why this research is worth doing, which is different to the value of the technology. The authors have used several well known approaches which are clearly explained, some validation is offered, this could be further strengthened. Some minor additions could also strength this work, for example why was the WOS database selected, why were the year spans selected?

 

Ans: Section 3.1:

 

• Why was the WOS database selected ? :
  1. Usefully Database Source: In general, MainPath processes three types of data: academic papers, patents, and legal cases. For academic papers, MainPath can read records from Web of Science (WOS), Scopus, Taiwan Citation Index – Humanities and Social Science, and Taiwan National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD). For patents, MainPath can read records from Thomson Innovation/Derwent Innovation and WEBPAT. Conclusion-MainPath process can run the records from WOS and collect the data very easy.

 

2. WOS Database in NTUT: Science Citation Index Expanded（SCIE,1990）、Social Sciences Citation Index（SSCI,1990）、Arts & Humanities Citation Index（A&HCI,1975）、Emerging Sources Citation Index（ESCI,2015）、Book Citation Index(2005)、Conference Proceedings Citation Index（CPCI,1975）、Current Chemical Reactions（CCR-Expanded,1985）and Index Chemicus（IC,1993）.Author make the conclusion to compare the both database as table 1.WOS follow the format of excel that is easy to analyze data than Scopus.

Table 1 Articles  compare WOS and Scopus

	file format	using software
WOS	.xls	Excel
Scopus	.csv	CSVed

 

3. Scopus are peer-reviewed journals in top-level subject fields: life sciences, social sciences, physical sciences and health sciences. It covers three types of sources: book series, journals, and trade journals.

 

4. Author refers to previously published articles :

• Most of them are literature reviews, but they are also widely used in the research of typical academic papers. The data usage of these two types of publications are different from each other. About 20% of literature reviews choose Web of Science instead of Scopus as the reference source for analysis and content. However, the number of papers that stated that Web of Science data is used is twice that of Scopus as figure 1. ^1.http://www.webofsciencegroup.com/isi

Figure 1.

 

• Overlapped part in Figure 2 shows that Web of Science is quoted among the 29,079 articles of thesis materials, there are 7,212 articles (25%) used simultaneously Scopus data, 1488 of them (5%) also quote Google Scholar data. http://www.webofsciencegroup.com/isi

 

 

Figure 2. Overlapped parts within three database

 

• Although Scopus contains more content than the WOS database, most people think that the materials included in WOS are of higher quality than Scopus, because the standard for the inclusion of materials in WOS is vetted academic journals, and JCR (Journal Citation Reports) provides information on these journals. The impact factor can be used by the researcher to judge the influence of the journal.Scopus reviewed and compared: the coverage and functionality of the citation database Scopus, including comparisons with Web of Science and Google Scholar: ^3.http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/DARLIN/2006-1220-200432/UUindex.htm

 

• Table 2 lists the top 10 journals in each phase for two groups. Although more and more journals are involved in publishing WOS- or Scopus-related papers, a bit different for the two groups are from the domain of information science& library science (Zhu & Weish, 2020). ²Zhu jwzhu ,& Weishu Liu, A tale of two databases: the use of Web of Science and Scopus in academic papers ,Springer in Scientometrics , 7 Feb 2020. DOI: 1007/s11192-020-03387-8.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: # WoS/Scopus studies, number of WoS/Scopus-related studies; % Within WoS/Scopus studies, relative share within all WoS/Scopus-related studies; % Within entire category, relative share within all SCI/SSCI records in this category. Only articles and reviews are considered.

 

4. Why ware reason? :In this study, author select the WOS database because sciences are more suitable for research topics-RFID as the above point1-4.
5. Making Plans for merging database: Author is attempting the new program to merge both WOS and Scopus in this year.

 

• Why were the year spans selected?

1. Author make the searched period from 1975 to 2019 in WOS. Finding the related papers published until 1995 as figure 3.

 

 

Figure 3.

 

2. Timespan: The author collect relevant literature on RFID’s topics in January 2020. In this way, the publication period of the topic’s keyword search in WOS was chose from 1975 to 2020. WOS:Timespan:All year to Present(2020)

 

3. Table 1 provides a useful summary of journal rankings for the reader. The authors categorise the papers in to 6 sections, each providing a descriptive review of the key papers. It is not totally clear how the 6 sections were derived. This could be clearly explained.

 

Ans: section 3.2:

• When input the query words , author obtain the 3 sections as journal、active year、papers from the WOS. In the g-index & h-index, it is necessary to run the main path program, and find the basic statistic in the output files as Figure 4(MainPath log).Author take the photo as figure 5 and look at the g-index & h- index.

Figure 4.

 

Figure 5.

 

• Revised by yellow marks in manuscript: After searching for papers in the WOS database by using keywords, and collecting the MainPath log, we ranked the 20 most influential journals in the RFID field in accordance with their g-index.

 

4. Figure 6 provides some really interesting information, but I feel its usefulness is diminished as the font is to small and detracts from the reader's visibility.

 

Ans: Section 3.4:

• Revised by yellow marks in manuscript :We use the edge-betweenness clustering technique to identify the research themes of the RFID literature. The result consists of six groups with the number of papers from 224 to 705 along with many small groups that published less than 224 papers. Through the analysis, the results are twenty clusters, and six clusters with citation counts of more than 200 were obtained. Figure 6 lists the research theme, number of papers, key words and phrases, and word cloud analysis results for each cluster.
• Authors changed the layout of this page to landscape.

 

5. Figure 7 is provides a very interesting model of the relationships between the various sectors identified. I think if the authors changed the layout of this page to landscape the connections would be easier to read. I think some additional discussion around this Figure its purpose, and application, would also benefit the reader.

Ans: Authors changed the layout of these pages (figure 5、figure 6、figure 7) to landscape.

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

Very interesting manuscript from the business perspective of RFID product development and management.

1. There are minor edits like "spaces", headings appearing on a different page to the rest of that section, and mixed fonts in the one paragraph.  Table 1 heading appearing on a different page.
2. A number of acronyms are not defined, e.g. ARC.  WOS was defined later than first used.
3. Critically, the figures do not come through very well.
   • Fig 1.  Readable, but could be improved with higher resolution.
   • Fig 2.  Similar to Fig 1.
   • Fig 3.  Similar to Fig 1.
   • Fig 4.  Bordering on being unreadable.  Need to higher resolution and enlarge.
   • Fig 5.  Unreadable.  Need to higher resolution and enlarge.  Highly critical for the manuscript.
   • Fig 6.  Unreadable.  Need to higher resolution and enlarge. Highly critical for the manuscript.
   • Fig 7.  Unreadable.  Need to higher resolution and enlarge. Highly critical for the manuscript.
   • Fig 8.  Similar to Fig 1.

Best regards.

Author Response

Ms. Lili Chen

Editor

MDPI applied sciences

.

2021-SEP.01

 

Dear Dr. Lili Chen

Re: Document reference No. applsci-1360020

 

 

Please find attached a revised version of our document “Knowledge Development Trajectories of the Radio Frequency Identification Domain: An Academic Study Based on Citation and Main Paths Analysis”. We would like to resubmit for publication as a(n) original Article in MDPI applied sciences/Special Issues /Data_Mining_Business_Domains.

 

Your comments and those of the reviewers were highly insightful and enabled us to improve the quality of our document. In the following pages are our responses to each comment from the reviewer(s) as well as your own comments.

 

Revisions in the text are shown yellow highlights. We hope that our revisions to the document combined with our accompanying responses will be sufficient to render our document suitable for publication in MDPI Applied Sciences.

 

 

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

 

Yours sincerely,

 

Mr. Su   Ph. D. Candidates,D&G General Manager

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Open Review1

1. There are minor edits like "spaces", headings appearing on a different page to the rest of that section, and mixed fonts in the one paragraph. Table 1 heading appearing on a different page.

Ans: Author move a heading appear on the same page and thanks

2. A number of acronyms are not defined, e.g. ARC. WOS was defined later than first used.

Ans: Author have added the full name in manuscript and thanks WOS(Web of Science).For ARC find the website that can dot write the full name, and also use the business logo “ARC Advisory Group”.

3. Critically, the figures do not come through very well.

Fig 1.  Readable, but could be improved with higher resolution.

Fig 2.  Similar to Fig 1.

Fig 3.  Similar to Fig 1.

Fig 4.  Bordering on being unreadable.  Need to higher resolution and enlarge.

Fig 5.  Unreadable.  Need to higher resolution and enlarge.  Highly critical for the manuscript.

Fig 6.  Unreadable.  Need to higher resolution and enlarge. Highly critical for the manuscript.

Fig 7.  Unreadable.  Need to higher resolution and enlarge. Highly critical for the manuscript.

Fig 8.  Similar to Fig 1.

Ans: Revise the higher resolution and enlarge by landscape

Best regards.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc