Review History


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Summary

  • The initial submission of this article was received on March 31st, 2015 and was peer-reviewed by 2 reviewers and the Academic Editor.
  • The Academic Editor made their initial decision on May 6th, 2015.
  • The first revision was submitted on June 26th, 2015 and was reviewed by 1 reviewer and the Academic Editor.
  • The article was Accepted by the Academic Editor on July 16th, 2015.

Version 0.2 (accepted)

· Jul 16, 2015 · Academic Editor

Accept

After this second round of reviews, the paper has considerably improved, so it has been accepted for publication.

Reviewer 1 ·

Basic reporting

Authors have addressed the majority of the changes suggested. Therefore, I recommend to accept the paper.

Experimental design

Ok

Validity of the findings

Ok

Version 0.1 (original submission)

· May 6, 2015 · Academic Editor

Major Revisions

In general, the evaluation received by the paper has been quite positive. Nevertheless, one of the reviewers has concerns about the description of the tools used in the analysis. Specifically, authors should provide information about the software and methods used to obtain the different networks and metrics. The rest of the comments are related to minor changes, although I encourage authors to incorporate them in the new version go the paper.

Reviewer 1 ·

Basic reporting

The aim of this paper it to perform a deep bibliometric analysis of the Chinese Interpreting Studies using social network analysis techniques.

In general, the paper is well written and organized. Although, the main drawback is that the paper is biased to the bibliometric Chinese literature. I miss a lot of important reference to co-word, co-citation, co-author, etc. In fact, the map of a research field is also known as Science Mapping analysis.

Moreover, the paper is somewhat large and some parts of it are repeated constantly along the paper.

Experimental design

The data acquisition is not well explained. Authors should make an effort, an explian the procedure and query used.

Validity of the findings

The findings are correct.

Additional comments

In what follows, some suggestions are comments are listed:

Line 77. Includes reference to social network analysis and citation analysis

Line 201. How data acquisition has been performed? Authors should describe the procedure and the query used to retrieve the data.

Line 295. “Cited one another’s research” is also known as co-author citation.

Line 317. Why the authors not use h-index to measure the most influential scholars?

Line 343. The authors used a non-common similarity measure. According to van Eck 2009, the Association strength should be used to normalize co-occurrence network. Also, the equivalence index has been traditionally used in co-word network.

Line 367. Under my point of view, 40% of authors not-matched is too much.

Line 394. Authors may refer to Zipf’s law: “Zipf's law states that while only a few words are used very often, many or most are used rarely”.

Line 462. The software used to perform the analysis and visualization should me mentioned. There are a great variety of software tool to perform a science mapping analysis (e.g. VOSViewer, SciMAT, Sci2 Tool, VantagePoint, etc.), and also a great variety of software to visualize network (e.g. Gephi, Pajek, etc.)

Line 512. Figure 3 should be enlarged and better laid out. Authors should draw the network avoiding use circular layout. Now, it is very difficult to see the relation between nodes of the same cluster.

Line 606. H-Classics should be used to highlight the mots influent works.

Reviewer 2 ·

Basic reporting

The paper carries out a scientometric survey on Chinese Interpreting studies (CIS) to obtain a description of the ways in which CIS scholars interact and which are the most influential studies. They use both traditional technique of citation analysis and Social Network Analysis.

The paper describes correctly their purpose and a considerable number of works are included. Moreover, different metrics are considered in the study. However, some points should be improved related to disscussion of the results obtained.

Experimental design

It would be necessary that authors detail the software and methods used to obtain results. Concretely,

+ In section 6.1, it is not mentioned a software to carry out the work. How authors have obtained the different networks and their different metrics?

+ In section 6.3, the specification of the software and the methods used to carry out this study neither they are mentioned.

Also, it would be convenient that authors specify the number of years considered in the study.

Validity of the findings

It is appropriate

Additional comments

Authors should improve the next points:

- Figure 3 it is very complicated to visualize. It would be convenient that authors try to simply or divide it to be able to understand better the results.

- In general, the section 6.3 would be reviewed. Some times it is very difficult to understand appropriately the results obtained. Definitions, descriptions and discussions are mixed and sometimes information is duplicated. It would be interesting that authors try following the same steps in the discussion of all results. First, it would be necessary to comment the specific numerical results of each table (in some tables, it is not specified the metrics shown neither in this section neither in section 5). Second, it would be necessary to show specific examples and detail the general conclusions. Normally, all information is available, but they should be restructured.

- Finally, some times authors use an acronym, but this is specified later. For example:
- - Line 51 the acronym “BCE” it is not specified previously.
- - Line 260 the acronym “PRA” it is not specified previously.

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