A Bibliometric Analysis of Research on the Metaverse for Smart Cities: The Dimensions of Technology, People, and Institutions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper presents a valuable bibliometric analysis of research on metaverses for smart cities, emphasizing three dimensions: technology, people, and institutions. 

Although this paper uses a vast material, it fails to consider fundamental issues of the smart city, in particular:

 

1)        The paper takes for guarantee the necessity to consider the three dimensions of the smart city.  If we consider technology a means to build a smart city, the city's smartness should be measured by its capacity to provide services to the community and the environment. The paper should differentiate between technology and the other two dimensions. I need clarification on why the environmental dimension was ignored in this paper.

 

2)        The performance and advances in research should be more than just the number of papers. Qualitative advances are the most significant and should be considered. This paper does not provide insights into the qualitative progress in the three dimensions. It should be indicated as a limitation in this paper and proposed for future research.

 

3)        The paper does not deal with the extensive use of computation resources, particularly energy (and water for energy generation), by the Metaverse. Since this dimension is pivotal in the smart city, it should be discussed. Authors should provide insights about the following questions: How to balance the metaverse's services to the smart city with the huge consumption of resources (which is not smart).

 

4)        The conclusion of the paper, while comprehensive, could benefit from a deeper discussion to provide more explicit future research avenues. This would inspire further exploration and development in the field of smart cities and metaverses.

 

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors,

You should provide the following information in the manuscript:

1. What is the aim of your study? What is the value of this research in comparison to related work? Why it is so important to define the research trends in the three dimensions of technology, people, and institutions? First of all, you should provide comprehensive conceptualization analysis to differ your perspective on "Metaverse" and to explain why the research is divided on three perspectives. (see the work of Piñeiro-Chousa, J., López-Cabarcos, M.Á., VittoriRomero)

2. Figure 1 doesn't contain all the research stages and should be improved. 

3. Please better describe the keywords analysis. I am not sure that key 1 and 2 were defined appropriately. The results may be broader than just taking into account the "metaverse" and "smart city" concept. Have you checked if were any misleadings in results? 

see:

Çınar Umdu, Duygu & Alakavuk, Ebru. (2020). UNDERSTANDING OF SMART CITIES, DIGITAL CITIES AND INTELLIGENT CITIES: SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES. ISPRS - International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. XLIV-4/W3-2020. 173-180. 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIV-4-W3-2020-173-2020.

D'Auria, Anna & Tregua, Marco & Bifulco, Francesco. (2014). “Digital City vs. Smart City: a fuzzy debate”, in Proceedings 3rd ICTIC Conference, ISSN 1339 - 231X.

https://www.itais.org/proceedings/itais2013/pdf/119.pdf 

etc.

Smart cities, digital cities, intelligent cities... Despite of similarities these are different concepts.  And what about the cognitive city? Why have you added the "Smart communication" concept to institution group?

The "metaverse" concept - analogically. 

Currently I am not agree with Author's perspective. You should argue what is the sense to broader the "smart city" and " metaverse" concepts? What are the advantages of it? 

4. You could also analyze the following works:

Ioanna Chatzopoulou, Paraskevi Tsoutsa, and Panos Fitsilis. 2024. How Metaverse is Affecting Smart Cities Economy. In Proceedings of the 27th Pan-Hellenic Conference on Progress in Computing and Informatics (PCI '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 254–259. https://doi.org/10.1145/3635059.3635099

Mapping Metaverse Research: Identifying Future Research Areas Based on Bibliometric and Topic Modeling Techniques Abderahman Rejeb, Karim Rejeb and Horst Treiblmaier, Information.

Singh, P. (2024). Navigating the Digital Dimensions of the Metaverse: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda Exploring Implications Across Industries and Customers. FIIB Business Review, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/23197145241247704

Shukla, Akanksha & Saurabh, Kumar & Ajith, Mr. (2023). METAVERSE: A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS. 17. 67-79. 10.31620/JCCC.09.23/07. 

Al-Enzi, Sanaa & Abbas, Sammar & Abbood, Abdulnasser & Muhsen, Yousif & Al-Hchaimi, Ahmed & Almosawi, Zainab. (2023). Exploring Research Trends of Metaverse: A Bibliometric Analysis. 10.1007/978-3-031-51716-7_2. 

Amar Johri, Parikshit Joshi, Shailendra Kumar, Garima Joshi, Metaverse for Sustainable Development in a bibliometric analysis and systematic literature review, Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 435, 2024, 140610, ISSN 0959-6526, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2024.140610.

Mutlu Avinç, G., Yıldız, A. A bibliometric and systematic review of scientific publications on metaverse research in architecture: web of science (WoS). Int J Technol Des Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-024-09918-1

C. Cassandra, M. N. Masrek and F. Aman, "Bibliometric Analysis of Trend in Metaverse Research," 2023 International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech), Malang, Indonesia, 2023, pp. 528-532, doi: 10.1109/ICIMTech59029.2023.10277747. 

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1416240.pdf

Huike, Li., Bo, Li. (2024). The state of metaverse research: a bibliometric visual analysis based on CiteSpace. Journal of Big Data, 11:1-23. doi: 10.1186/s40537-024-00877-x

Jamaluddin Hos, Sitti Rachmawati Yahya, J. Juhaepa, Muhammad Arsyad, Dendi Pratama; Evolution and development of metaverse: Bibliometric analysis. AIP Conf. Proc. 26 March 2024; 2927 (1): 060043. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0192517 

Piñeiro-Chousa, J., López-Cabarcos, M.Á., VittoriRomero, V. et al. Evolution and trends of the metaverse in business and management: A bibliometric analysis. Rev Manag Sci (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11846-024-00741-5.

5. It is better not to end the article with a description of limitations, but with a description of prospects for the future.

Best regards. 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

English language require minor revisions.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thanks for considering all my comments on the paper revision. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Author/s,

As I previously suggested, it will be better to complete Figure 1 with the final Discussion section and conclusions according to PRISMA checklist  [103] https://systematicreviewsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13643-021-01626-4.  It is missed. 

Although I still don't see much point in such extended keyword analysis and their appropriate selection, the rest of improvements are quite acceptable.

Best regards.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The English language require minor revisions

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf