Application of Multi-Plant Symbiotic Systems in Phytoremediation: A Bibliometric Review
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear editor,
I carefully read the article "Advances in studies on the application of multi-plant symbiotic systems in phytoremediation: A visualization analysis based on CiteSpace", which contains a "review" of publications revealing recent trends in phytoremediation in multi-plant symbiotic systems, using an open access bibliometric analysis tool.
First of all, CiteSpace is not appropriate to have software used to perform bibliometric analysis in the title. Because bibliometric analysis is a method, however, there are many different open access or commercial software that can do bibliometric analysis.
To give examples from open access, "Bibliometrix- https://www.bibliometrix.org/home/”, "Vosviewer- https://www.vosviewer.com/".
Therefore, I would like to start by suggesting that the title be updated within this comment.
The 20-year history of literature related to the field of study seems sufficient. Based on the extensive work done by the authors and the syntheses extracted, I can say that this article can be accepted after minor revisions in your international journal. I'll give you my comments on a line-by-line basis below.
Page 3, Line 102 and Line 105: Please add reference to Cite Space (6.1.R6) [26] here
Provide some detailed information about "Keyword co-occurrence network and clustering analysis" and "co-citation analysis" in section 2.2.
Best regards
Author Response
Dear Reviewers,
We sincerely thank the editor and all reviewers for their valuable feedback, which we use to improve manuscript quality. The reviewer comments are listed below in black font and specific concerns have been numbered. Our responses are given in red font and changes/additions to the manuscript are given in the red text.
Point 1: First of all, CiteSpace is not appropriate to have software used to perform bibliometric analysis in the title. Because bibliometric analysis is a method, however, there are many different open access or commercial software that can do bibliometric analysis. To give examples from open access, "Bibliometrix- https://www.bibliometrix.org/home/”, "Vosviewer- https://www.vosviewer.com/".Therefore, I would like to start by suggesting that the title be updated within this comment.
Response 1: We sincerely appreciate the valuable comments. We have changed the title of the review to: Application of multi-plant symbiotic systems in phytoremedi-ation: A Bibliometric Review, which can be found on page 1, line 2-3 of the revised manuscript.
Point 2: Page 3, Line 102 and Line 105: Please add reference to Cite Space (6.1.R6) [26] here
Response 2: As suggested by the reviewer, we added the Cite Space (6.1.R6) [26] on line 126 and 132 on page 3.
Point 3: Provide some detailed information about "Keyword co-occurrence network and clustering analysis" and "co-citation analysis" in section 2.2.
Response 3: We agree with your suggestion, however, this review describes "keyword co-occurrence networks and cluster analysis" and "co-citation analysis" in detail in section 3.3, lines 180-187, and section 3.4, lines 364-369, respectively. This is because we believe it will help the reader to better understand the content of this section.
We have also added a more detailed description of " keyword co-occurrence networks and cluster analysis ", which is given in lines 180-183 on page 5 of the revised manuscript.
We have studied reviewers comments carefully and have revised our manuscript. Attached please find the revised version and relevant document, which we would like to submit for your kind consideration.
Once again, thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. And we hope that the corrections will meet with approval.
Reviewer 2 Report
This manuscript reported the advances in the application of multi-plant symbiotic systems in phytoremediation using a CiteSpace-based visualization analysis method. The results would be interesting to the readers and have a value for publication. Before it can be considered for acceptance, some revisions should be done by considering the comments shown at the bottom:
1) Abstract needs to be refined, by considering the importance of this study and future possible valuable research fields.
2) lines 47-50: what is the pressing issue?
3) line 53, delete the words "among others". Please note the same revision in the text.
4) lines 67-68: delete the words ", etc.". Please note the same revision in the text.
5) Lines 78-79: the authors mentioned numerous review articles on phytoremediation research. In the introduction, the authors should highlight the importance of this study, compared with many related review articles published previously.
6) Line 92: On February 4, 2023, the database for December 31, 2022, was retrieved. The sentence is NOT clear. Please rewrite it.
7) Line 98: the authors mentioned that the literature in this field was first published in 2002. Prior to 2002, were there no references around the world in the field of phytoremediation? Afterward, the authors mentioned that phytoremediation techniques were first proposed in the 1990s, as shown in lines 121-123.
8) Line 102-103: to remove duplications? What is its meaning? Here the authors should mention the methods for selecting literature in the M&M section.
9) Line 114-118: it is better to incorporate some references into the methods.
10) Lines 146, 148: please remove the words such as ,etc. and ,among others.
11) Table 1: Peoples R China, please use a full name. Here, should some references done in Taiwan be included? By the ways, Authors in Table 1 are almost Chinese. Rank 7, country Germany, Insitute: Zhejiang University. The authors should check the contents of Table 1 to reduce mistakes or errors.
12) Lines 152-167: for the symbols such as Q value, S value, and BC values, the authors should give some explanations in detail.
13) Figures 2 and 3, legends are not clear.
14) Lines 191-194: the sentences need to be revised. The authors should take care the precise of data by citing the reference [33].
15) lines 243-244: hyperaccumulator plants are more efficient at extracting carbon dioxide and produce less biomass for harvesting after remediation. Here, some necessary references should be added.
16) Lines 262-263: the authors mentioned that synergistic effect of rhizosphere soil microorganisms and soil enzymes in improving phytoremediation efficiency. Some explanations and necessary reference should be added.
17) lines 313-314: please rewrite this sentence. The authors should give some explanations about the symbol CFXBS.
18) Table 3: Dos academic press not belong to a journal?
19) lines 346, 356, 364: a 2015 research paper by Bani et al.,[80]; a 2019 paper by Zeng et al.,[82]; a 2011 study by An et al.,[83], the authors should make some revisions for these contents.
20) Lines 379-382: In 1986, some studies regarding phytoremediation were done. In the M&M section, the authors only mentioned the references after 2002. Some necessary explanations should be provided in the text.
21) 4. Discussion and analysis: delete the word "analysis". Overall, the authors gave some discussion in the field of phytoremediation. If possible, the authors would try to consider the hypothesis and future valuable research fields resulting from the results in this review.
22) lines 502-505: where is a statistical analysis of the published literature in the text?
23) Lines 541-542: This review can provide some theoretical guidance for improving the efficiency of phytoremediation. What are the contents of theoretical guidance? The authors should highlight the contents involved.
24) In Acknowledgment: some funding message should be deleted because they are mentioned in Funding.
A moderate editing of English language will be required.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
