RFID Tags for On-Metal Applications: A Brief Survey

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript presents the survey results of on-metal RFID tags through the analysis of scientific articles and patents. The contents are rich, and the analysis is careful. The listed comments below have to be considered for the improvement of the manuscript:

1.     Line 7 and Line 19: abbreviation UHF should be defined at its first time appearing in the Abstract and main texts. UHF has included “frequency” so the term “UHF frequency” might be improper.

2.     Line 28: the phrase “on difficult metallic surfaces” is too vague to understand the meaning of “difficult”.

3.     Lines 37-42: this section should include more references to illustrate the current tech because [3] is just a website, while technology that tackles the on-metal issue is the main theme of the present manuscript.

4.     Some figures can be combined together, e.g., the pie charts of Figs 1 & 2 to be combined as Fig 1(a) and Fig 1(b), for enhancing the readability of the article.

5.     Line 81 says “selected articles”, and the authors have to disclose and specify more details for the survey methods (e.g., keywords, criteria for exclusion and inclusion) in the Section 2, so that readers could expect what might be excluded (or overlooked) due to the targeted scope. The above point applies to the Patents Section in 3.2.

6.     Pages 8 & 9: the total number of patents analyzed in Figures 10, 11 & 12 are different. Please explain.

7.     Page 9: what does CNC (Line 208) stands for?

8.     Lines 287-291 in Conclusions (also, Lines 10-12 in Abstract): should rephrase to emphasize/specify potential tech needs/issues for advising future advancements of on-metal tags, not just pointing out the ample room for R&D.

Extensive editing of English language required

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This article provides a brief survey of RFID tags for on-metal applications, highlighting the increase in interest in recent years and the dominance of flexible tags and UHF frequency range. The manuscript required a revision before further consideration. My comments and suggestions are as follows:

1.     The abstract is noveltyless and poorly written.  Rewrite the abstract to make it more constructive with clear methodology, clear results, and findings. The abstract should have at least one sentence per each: context and background, motivation, hypothesis, methods, results, and conclusions. Try to avoid abbreviations in the abstract.

2.     The introduction should include the problem context, literature review, and the research gap analysis of the previously published research. Research questions and research objectives are missing. Authors are recommended to spend much time revising this section.  The discussion is short in the text, expand it more. And compare with similar cases and papers. There are theoretical, managerial, and societal implications missing. What is the primary objective of your study?

3.     The material and methods section is premature. Try to revise this section properly. The authors are advised to study recent publications in this direction and revise this section properly.

4.     In recent days a thousand of works have been done in this direction. The authors are required to clarify the novelty and especially the major contributions in this direction. Some publications are as follows, include such studies in your manuscript:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jjimei.2022.100084; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2022.109811.

5.     For a survey study most important part is research gaps and future extensions, which is missing in this article. Try to describe the gap properly with future extensions.

6.     The conclusion should be rewritten with unique findings, novelty, and limitations of the study. 

Check the whole manuscript for typos and Grammatical mistakes. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for the revisions.

Minor editing of English language required

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors avoided some of my previous suggestions. Thus, still, revision is required as follows:

It was advised to use the full form of the abbreviations in the abstract, instead of abbreviations. Still, some abbreviations are there.

Make a separate section for future extensions and illustrate properly with more future extensions.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

The present form of the manuscript may be accepted for publication.