Bibliometric and Content Analysis of the Scientific Work on Artificial Intelligence in Journalism

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The tittle should address in a more concrete way the approach and the focus of the study. For example, by using a tittle such as ‘Bibliometric and Content Analysis of the Scientific Work on Artificial Intelligence in Journalism’ the reader should be able to understand perfectly the scope of the article.

Concepts ‘misinformation and fake news’ (line 29) are not the same. Furthermore, here the authors may mention to the difference between misinformation and disinformation and explain that fake news is only a part of the disinformation phenomena.

‘According to Reuters' latest Technology Trends and Predictions report’ (line 45): Do you refer to the Reuters Oxford Institute for Journalism? If so, this is not the latest: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/journalism-media-and-technology-trends-and-predictions-2024

The state of the art should be built on a more solid way. There are definitive weaknesses in this part.

Nonetheless, the main weakness is the following:  the author/s remark/s several times on their study to be comprehensive.  It cannot be called a comprehensive study, however, as the terms used as  keywords are, exclusively,  ‘Artificial Intelligence’, ‘AI’, ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’, ‘Journalism’, ‘News’ and ‘Media’. Therefore, what about other common terms such as: automated journalism” (Caswell & Dörr, 2018; Graefe, 2016; Lindén, 2017; Napoli, 2012) or “algorithm journalism” (Dörr, 2016; Diakopoulos, 2014) just to mention some of them?

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The expression ‘very real tool’ is not appropriate in formal English and the meaning is not clear (line 43)

Author Response

Thank you for your feedback and improvements. We appreciate your review. We have made some improvements and additions to the review you requested. For your review, we put a yellow mark

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for submitting this interesting and pertinent bibliometric study on a subject as current and relevant as the implications of the use of artificial intelligence in journalism and how this issue has been addressed from scholars over the last few years.

Although this is a very interesting study, here you can see some questions that should be reviewed in order to improve the consistency of this manuscript in order to be considered for publication in Journalism and Media. They are as follows:

1) Regarding the Introduction section: 

. Why is this introduction section so focused on quality journalism when the article aims to analyse all studies on IA in journalism from a much wider perspective? Later in the text (line 79) we can read: "This research uses bibliometric methods to analyse the development of scholarly works on artificial intelligence in journalism".

. This introduction would need to provide more context about the disruption provoked by technology and the spread of AI in the media industry instead of presenting the challenges of AI for media just from the point of view of quality and ethics in the field and media literacy in such a mixture of big issues that go far beyond AI.

Also, at the end of this introduction the author should present the purposes of this "bibliometric analysis" and why this sort of study is needed and important. 

Otherwise this introduction seem to correspond another type of article. It may seem a far cry from what both the title and the abstract imply.

. There are no research questions nor research objectives mentioned in the manuscript. Including both RO and QR would help author make the study more consistent and coherent.

2) Regarding the Method employed in this study:

. The author could have included a short background providing information about the context for this study, if there have been previous bibliometric studies so far in the field (mainly about tech and journalism).

. line 98: correct spelling: Social Sciences journals (plural). There are several areas within this category in Scopus database.

. lines 113-116:

"The findings from 113 the bibliometric analysis shed light on significant trends and patterns in scholarly works 114 relating to artificial intelligence in journalism. This detailed analysis provides valuable 115 insights into the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence in journalism and the key 116 contributors to its development"

Why does the author seem to talk about fait accompli (findings, shed light on,...) instead of pointing out why this methodology may be ideal for the purposes of this study?

. Also, we do not need to put first initial of author's name in brackets, just the surname (Y. Wang, 2021)-> (Wang, 2021).

. lines 120-121: 

"The findings and insights generated through this methodology make a valuable contribution to the understanding and advancement of artificial intelligence in journalism."

This sentence does not make sense ("findings generated"?). It actually could be eliminated since there appear to be the same idea of "understanding..." written just in the following sentence. It seems that this paragraph repeats the same idea several times and can therefore be summed up in fewer words.

3) Regarding Results:

.First paragraph (lines 126-132):

"Bibliometric analysis is a method used to measure and analyse the trends, patterns, and impact of research in a particular field through scientific publications. In the context of this research, bibliometric analysis was conducted on journal articles published and indexed in the Scopus database with the query "( TITLE-ABS-KEY ( "artificial intelligence") OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( ai ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( "Artificial Intelligence (AI)" ) AND TITLE-130 ABS-KEY ( journalism ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( news ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( "mass media" )". Restrictions were made on English-language articles, social science fields, and publications within the 2019-2023 timeframe".

"Bibliometric analysis is a method..." should also appear explained above in the Method section. Besides, the way the bibliometric analysis was conducted would fit better in the Methodology section because it would help to better understand the type of analysis that has been carried out.

For this we recommend to follow:

Zupic, I., y Čater, T. (2015). Bibliometric methods in management and organization. Organizational Research Methods, 18(3), 429-472. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428114562629

. line 132: "social science fields, and publications... BETTER: "in Social Sciences journals"

. line 134: "Based on data obtained from Scopus Document Search, the number of articles found 134 was 331 articles".

BETTER to add here: (n=331), in brackets. The use of the abbreviation "n" this way is recommended whenever reference is made to numerical results within this study.

. There's some wording issue here: author may avoid to repeat words in the same sentence and use others (pieces, papers) instead. This happens in different times throughout the manuscript. 

. Line 143: "The United States has the highest number of documents (82) and citations (1,729) in the dataset" 

What does it mean? Number of articles published in the US journals or by authors from this country? Then this could be clarified maybe by rewriting the sentence ("regarding the authorship, the country distribution of article indicates that...)

And in the next paragraph, instead of "Countries such as...", it would be clearer to say "Authors from countries such as..."

. In this regard, I wonder what happens with the so common co-authorship? Are the papers written by authors from different countries at the same time taken into account in this study?

. Line 159: We read "Of the 331 articles studied on Artificial Intelligence in journalism, there were 10 articles that were most cited" AND Lines 162-163: "... is linked to or cited by other articles in this study (table 3). Meanwhile, the other 8 of the 10 most cited articles do not have links or are not cited by other articles in this study".

Maybe some edition/revision of English language by a native would help the manuscript to be more consistent. Again, author should avoid repetitions of words so close together in the text

. HERE the author should make efforts to explain why some 8 out of the top ten articles identified as the most cited ones in the Scopus database are not cited by other articles in this study when all articles cited here come from the Scopus database. It seems contradictory unless the author counts citations beyond Scopus database (?). If so, this should be clarified or better explained.  

. Lines 164-171: Why this enumeration about citation analysis? Instead, write it in other paragraph in order to better explain why all this mean?

. Line 167: "There may be limitations in the data collection process or methodology used, so links or citations between articles may not be identified." This limitation should be also referred to in the Conclusions section.

. Table 3: there is a spelling error: "Kluster" several times. This should be "cluster".

4) Discussion

. The discussion section should focus more on explaining and evaluating the results, showing how them are related to literature review or previous studies, and giving response to the research objectives and questions (not previously formulated).

. Line 221: "Based on bibliometric analysis, it can be seen that studies on journalism and information technology still..."

Suddenly the study refers to information technology? The bibliometric analysis was not just about AI in journalism then?

AND Lines 224-225: "The use of keywords in this study indicates the existence of several new paradigms in journalism studies that are strongly influenced by technology (Figure 2). Some of the new paradigms that have emerged include:"

Or this should be "by AI"? It's not clear in this study why it refers to AI when discussion and conclusion both come to more general grounds like information technology and new technologies. 

. Moreover, to what extent is it possible that a bibliometric review of studies on a particular technology can be used to extract paradigms about any technology in the field of journalistic media? 

. Line 203: we see (Pavlik & Ltd, 2013). This is wrong: (Pavlik, 2023).

5) Conclusions

. Some limitations of the study could be underlined in this section.

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Some edition/revision of English language by a native would help the manuscript to be more consistent. The author should avoid repetitions of words so close together in the text and rewrite some sentences to make them more understandable.

 

Author Response

Thank you for your feedback and improvements. We appreciate your review. We have made some improvements and additions to the review you requested. For your review, we put a green mark

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper is a bibliometric analysis of the use of artificial intelligence in journalism. Despite only being a bibliometric analysis, this article presents pertinent data that highlights what has been the concern of researchers in the field of journalism about the use of artificial intelligence.

In this sense, the data presented is pertinent, but the paper could be improved. I therefore suggest that the authors make some improvements:

1. in the methodological section, they must justify why they only chose to analyse the Scopus database.

2. In the discussion of the results, they should better explain the analysis and the relationship they establish between Artificial Intelligence and Fake news, algorithms and automated journalism.

3. The conclusions should systematise the main results of this bibliometric analysis and explain whether the objectives they set themselves were achieved. There should also be a final paragraph highlighting the contribution of this research to the development of scientific and academic knowledge.

Author Response

Thank you for your feedback and improvements. We appreciate your review. We have made some improvements and additions to the review you requested. For your review, we put a blue mark

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The difference between disinformation and misinformation is undoubtedly a key point. The authors have checked the use of both words in this second version  -They indicate the distinction in line 31 to 36- which was a required change. This part is, therefore, correctly solved.

They have already updated the bibliography (f.e. Newman, 2024;Küng, 2024;)

Finally, Methods and Discussion sections are better built than in previous version. 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Line 48: "artificial intelligence has emerged as a very real tool that can assist society..."

The authors' choosen word "real" is not correct. "Real" means  "objective existence". Instead of it , they should use the word: "useful"- which, in my opinion, matches perfectly with the meaning they want to transmit.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Many thanks for the revision. This piece of research is ready to be published.

Regards