A Review of Agricultural Land Functions: Analysis and Visualization Based on Bibliometrics

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The study provides a comprehensive analysis of agricultural land functions and their related studies, and some useful findings have been obtained. However, the following problems exist and need further improvement by the authors.

1. Further refinement of the introduction is needed. For example, what is the difference between agricultural land and land systems? Why does the study need to be an overview of agricultural land systems?

2. Is the focus of the study on agricultural land systems or agricultural land functions? Although the title is Agricultural Land Functions, more space is devoted to agricultural land use, land cover change, agricultural land structure, biodiversity, etc.

3. Can agricultural land functions and services be equated? Are the two fundamentally different? What is the difference between the research focus of the two? Can the authors give a relatively objective conclusion from the extensive literature research? The current research makes no distinction between the two concepts.

4. The current paper is recital and needs to be properly trimmed and summarised according to the main lines of research. The original unprocessed figures should be placed in an annexed file. Figures and graphs that significantly support the results and arguments are appropriate in the main text, and these can be processed twice and further refined.

5. It is recommended that the frontiers of agricultural land function research continue to be refined. At present, it is clear that the depth of grasp of the frontier is not sufficient, but only the expression of apparent results.

6. The relationship between the function of agricultural land and sustainability is not clearly explained: what does functional sustainability mean? How can sustainability be studied based on functional analysis? What are the differences between different research paradigms? Why?

7. It is recommended that the authors further refine and enrich their findings, as the current study is more of a visual explanation of bibliometric results and lacks in-depth analysis and more valuable findings.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The Article „A review of agricultural land functions: analysis and visualization” is an analysis of the subject matter of scientific publications from 1991-2021 on the functions of agricultural land. This article collected 1643 pieces of literature on agricultural land function from the Web of Science Core Collection as research materials. The HistCite Pro 2.1, CiteSpace, and VOSviewer 1.6.18 software were used as the bibliometrics analysis tools to study basic information, research progress, hotspots, and frontiers on agricultural land function.

Personally, I am not a fan of articles that represent bibliometric analysis. I believe that they are only a prelude to the research that should be conducted. However, the reviewed article should be considered more than just a bibliometric analysis, which is a big plus and an asset. The authors went a step further in their analysis. In addition to the statistical study itself (done correctly), they also analyzed the subject matter of the articles, looking at the evaluation and valuation of agricultural land function, the interaction and driving factors between agricultural land functions, and the relationship between agricultural land function and sustainability. This study clarifies the concepts, research progress, hotspots, and frontiers of agricultural land function. It could help researchers further understand the research status on the agricultural land function.

The article is properly structured, containing all the elements that should be found in a good scientific article.

I have only minor comments:

1. please improve the quality of the figures. In figures 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 - the elements of the legend are unreadable. Figure 8 - is quite unreadable - I suggest enlarging it.

2 The editor will certainly pay attention to the form of references notes and the final layout of references, incompatible with the MDPI guidelines. The whole article, by the way, is editorially inconsistent with the MDPI guidelines.

After these editorial changes and corrections, I believe that the article is suitable for publication.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

I read with interest the article "A review of agricultural land functions: analysis and visualisation" and I think the topics presented can be quite interesting to understand some aspects of agricultural land functions. In particular, the authors collected 1643 articles on agricultural land functions from the Web of Science Core Collection and used several software tools (HistCite Pro 2.1, CiteSpace and VOSviewer 1.6.18) to provide a bibliometric analysis dedicated to the study of background information, research progress, hotspots and frontiers on agricultural land functions.

The article is generally well explained and the results highlighted the main bibliometric data on more than 30 years of studies on this topic. In my humble opinion, the actual form of the article is clear and the contents are convincing; therefore, I believe the paper can be published in the journal Land after minor modifications.  

Some indications follow:

TITLE. It is not very clear, e.g. the authors should insert the term 'bibliometric analysis'.

Database. I appreciated the collection of the period 1991-2021 on WoS but, at the same time, I wonder why the SCOPUS database was not also considered. At the same time, I stress that all the papers published in 2022 are missing.

2.1. Data source. I think this section should be explained in more detail to understand the real string used to extract the documents.

3.1.1 Section. Lines 179-180: "greater" is "smaller"? Line 173: "whic"?

3.1.2 Section. It should be rewritten because some sentences are not very clear (e.g. lines 191-192).

Figure 3. The current version is not readable. I suggest reducing the scale of the GCS data to make the graph useful.

Table 5. I suggest providing more information on the description of the table content to make the explanation clearer.

5. Conclusions. I feel that this section should introduce any limitations of the study.

Template. The template is not perfectly adhered to, e.g. the authors and logo are missing.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

1. The authors do not give a full and detailed explanation of the comments in 4~7, including the ideas for revision, how they were revised, and the revision results. Therefore, it is not clear what the authors have revised.

2. The language needs to be embellished.

3. In terms of land functions and sustainability, please explain in detail how the limits/thresholds/indicators of sustainability were determined based on the definition and measurement of functions.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx