Lab-to-Field Transition in FBG Sensors: A Quantitative Assessment of Literature-Reported Deployment Maturity

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The review addresses the issue of deploying sensors based on Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) technology. The review is very well structured and includes many up-to-date sources. As its scientific basis, it mainly uses articles from the Scopus database.

A potential issue in the article is the slightly subjective evaluation of the maturity level to which individual papers are assigned. Unfortunately, it is not clear how this subjectivity could be fully eliminated.

The review would benefit from higher-quality (higher-resolution) figures. It does not contain many new findings but serves as a summary of the applications of FBG technology. If possible, the review could also be extended to include a financial analysis, as economic considerations are one of the main factors influencing whether a technology is implemented in practice or not.

 

Author Response

Please see the attached Response to Reviewers document.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Upon accepting this review paper I was genuinely interested to read the findings. As a person doing research in the field of optical fiber Bragg sensors for more than 25 years I was very keen on seeing  the authors' respond to the important question: “is our lab work making an actual impact in the real world?” 

I regret to say that although the authors have carried out an extremely well executed and thorough literature search their findings do not answer this question. Research activity differs greatly form real world adoption. When a technology leaves the lab environment and is adopted by end users the results are very rarely reported in academic journals. It is then in the hands of photonic companies and end users, and the actions/findings of these weren’t included in this review. I would expect the manuscript to consider at least patents on the subject or even further, market analysis /white papers. Furthermore, this is true for any technology and it’s not limited to optical fiber sensors and FBGs.

Although I see strong merit in this work as a review of recent publication on the field I don’t think the results can actually offer an accurate insight into the Real-World Adoption of FBGs.

With this in mind I am afraid I must reject this publication in its current form and title and encourage the authors to resubmitted adopting a different approach. I see two options: either broad the analysis base beyond journal publications or write the manuscript and conclusions as an assessment of literature-reported field deployment rather than real-world adoption per se.

Some minor suggestions related to the literature review and presentation:

The current, ongoing year (2026) shouldn’t be included in the statistics.   

Figures 4-8 have merit in scientific publication only if they correspond to actual published manuscripts. The corresponding references should be stated or else the figures should be removed/ adapted.

Author Response

Please see the attached Response to Reviewers document.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The work by Alhussein et al. reviewed the lab-to-field transition in FBG sensors: a quantitative assessment of deployment maturity and real-world adoption. This review is very useful for the development of FBG sensors. But there remain some issues to be addressed before I recommend it for the publication as below:

1. Though the authors seek to address some key questions in FBG sensors, there have many reviews related to FBG sensors. So what is the exact contribution or advance of this work different from others?
2. Which database are used for the construction of your dataset? Have you considered the language influence for the dataset construction?
3. What are the quantitively parameters used to judge the criteria for each level, where current description is qualitive in lines 114-118? Especially, Table 2 gives some 2-4 and 2-3 level cases. So how to count these in your study, which should be clear in the review?
4. 3 shows the distribution of the FBG publications overall. But it is better and useful to generate a map to demonstrate the maturity difference and development stage for each country in the related technology.
5. The categories mainly based on the application field. In fact, how about the material and structure related for these sensors, which could greatly influence their application fields?
6. It is better to introduce the top and bottom limit for each of the investigated FBG sensors in all Tables.

Author Response

Please see the attached Response to Reviewers document.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors have addressed the comments and the manuscript can be accepted for publication.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

All my concerns have well been responded and I recommend the acceptance for the publication.