Meeting Ourselves or Other Sides of Us?—Meta-Analysis of the Metaverse
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper has an interesting and state of the art topic, the authors claimed that they will review the last three years literature to meet the research objectives:
1) verify how the Metaverse is being represented and characterized;
2) identify the main dimensions that facilitate/influence the acceptance of the Metaverse
3) identify the leading technologies that suit the Metaverse concept
The paper in its current format, it is not up to the standard of a journal paper and has so many shortages, there are a set of suggestions that may improve the paper:
1. The Background is very lite, and it is not related to the three main research questions mentioned by the authors. I suggest that you include a comprehensive "Related Work" section that reviews the state-of-the-art related work or build a table of the related work.
2. The methodology part is not mentioning the exclusion criteria. how many papers were initially reviewed, etc. It has jumped directly to the inclusion criteria.
3. I cannot connect the research findings with the research questions, for example, research question 2 is not answered at all in the paper as well as the main research questions.
Although the paper tried to answer important research questions related to Metaverse, it is not of a journal standard and must be thoroughly improved.
Author Response
Please see the attachment file.
Thank you for your attention!
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The proposed paper is aimed at identifying the main concepts and themes associated with the Metaverse concept using Leximancer software.
The submitted paper has the standard structure of a research paper, it has an extended introduction that integrates a good amount of recent published papers regarding various Metaverse / virtual reality elements. The motivation of the study is stated at the end of the introduction section as a detailed explanation of the methodology applied to the most frequent themes and main concepts associated with the analyzed articles.
The authors have proposed qualitative research to understand concepts, ideas, dimensions associated with the Metaverse concepts. The authors made use of the popular Leximancer QDA software solution to increase the validity of the analyses while managing the data more easily.
The methods section is well documented and presented the data gathering, data analyzing procedure as well as the results. In total the authors have selected 50 articles/scientific papers from well-known database platforms (B-On, Scopus and Google Scholar) using three main keywords: Metaverse, virtual reality and gaming.
Figure 1 presents the two main themes with similar relevance within the 50 selected articles. Figure 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 figure caption description should be extended as they each have only one word.
The article should be considered as a review paper, not a research paper as the proposed paper doesn't present any original/novel aspects.
As presented by the authors, the proposed study is part of a Ph.D project. The research should be extended either on a larger scale, that would include a larger sample and therefore the authors should propose an extended workflow to enable a better categorize (themes and concepts)
Author Response
Please see the attachment file.
Thank you for your attention!
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The Authors addressed all the comments raised for the previous versions.
Many thanks for the good work.
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have clearly formulated objectives and a research question, and provided both theoretical and empirical findings that contribute to the existing literature and can be utilized for future investigations.
The conclusions drawn from this study serve to complement the literature review and advance the empirical portion of the ongoing Ph.D. research.
The suggestions regarding the Figure caption have been addressed and resolved.
