Scientometric Analysis for Cross-Laminated Timber in the Context of Construction 4.0
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors of article considered a very interesting and current subject. The analysis of the 20-year period of research on this subject confirms a significant increase in interest in this field in the world. The paper is clear theoretical argument based on many substantive comparisons in scientific publications of two fields, i.e. the position of CLT wood and 4.0 Industry. It would be good to mention the real place of glued timber in the world construction production, but this topic could be continued in subsequent publications.
The authors of the paper put a great work of effort into comparing the two fields described above, which should be considered a very valuable contribution to the development of this field, which is confirmed by Fig. 2, which clearly shows the increased global interest in this field.
The paper presents the first scientometric comparison study of the field as a whole, 753 documents, between journals and conference proceedings, were considered for Cross-laminated timber and 567 for 4.0 Industry in construction, based on bibliometric analysis (keywords), scientometric analysis (technique measuring and analyzing scientific literature) coexistence of authors and regions as well as in terms of future trends.
Author Response
The authors would like to thank the Reviewer #1 for his words about the article. On the other hand, explaining the current state of glued timer in construction production, although greatly interesting, it could extend the current length of the journal, which is already 44 pages, and it could even be off topic. Yet, the authors are keen to keep the research and CLT and this topics might be part of future publications.
Reviewer 2 Report
The article Production of cross-glued wood in the context of Construction 4.0 is interesting and attractive to the reader. It brings new knowledge resulting from the authors' own research. The basic idea was:
To write a review post that would provide bibliographic information about CLT. This study makes a scientometric overview comparison between CLT and the impact of Industry 4.0 in the construction industry, focusing on worldwide academic publications from 2006 to 2022.
The article is written on 44 pages, applies knowledge from 116 literary sources. It contains chapters that conveniently divide the article into:
1. Introduction
2. Research methodology
2.1. Bibliometric analysis
2.2. Scientometric analysis
2.3. Future trends
3. Results for Cross-laminated timber in Construction
3.1. Data acquisition
3.2. Keyword co-occurrence analysis
3.3. Co-author co-occurrence analysis
3.4. Network of countries/regions and institutions
3.5. Author co-citation network
3.6. Journal co-citation network
3.7. Document co-citation network and clustering
4. Results for Industry 4.0 in Construction
4.1. Data acquisition
4.2. Keyword co-occurrence analysis
4.3. CiteSpace network maps
5. Future Trends
5.1. Overview
5.2. Future trends
6. Conclusions
The article contains many typos, e.g.
r. 54 avoidance
r. 63 Modeling
r. 70 independent
r. 71 opportunities
r. 76 naturally
r. 80 at the end is a dot
...and others... (read and correct errors and typos)
r. 103 The investigation was completed over the last 20 years, from March 2002 to April 2022 - in the abstract you state that the research was from 2006 to 2022, the same is true in all materials, images, tables (2006-2022)
r. 193 Table 1 has very large line spacing, format it!
r. 208 picture 2 is quite blurry, improve visibility, sharpen!
r. 228 table 2 similarly to table 1 put in the format (large spacing)
Couldn't you express the data in tables 1 and 2 graphically to make it clearer and more understandable?
Figures 3 and 4 are difficult to imagine, similarly also figures 13 and 14.
r. 284 table 3 has already been mentioned - there are large rows!
r. 360 Make Figure 7 more readable, clearer!
r. 385 similarly to r. 360
r. 420 The table has very large line spacing, format it!
r. 444 Edit! Texts in one line, write according to the template!
r. 445 is very far from the table
r. 510 make the picture sharper!
r. 530 and 531 big gap
r. 790 if the main chapter 5 is called future trend, shouldn't subsection 5.2 be called the same!
r. 823 – 830 Why is there a different font? Are there any reasons for this?
In terms of content, the article meets all the criteria for contributions of the mentioned type. I criticize only formal shortcomings that do not lower its level. After editing, I recommend accepting the article.
Author Response
The authors would like to thank Reviewer 2 for taking the time in this article. As the reviewer expressed, the typos have been fixed in the document, and all the formatting errors as well. Some of the graphs have been replaced with new ones with sharped geometries, but the authors would like to mention that the reason for the original blur ones was the software used like Scopus or VOSviewer, and its resolution was not as good as desired. Additionally, some of the tables and figures might not as simple to understand in simple sight, but the authors intend to keep them as they are so the readers could understand the reason behind the analysis, and even to explore different approaches if they desire.
Reviewer 3 Report
This is a good investigation and analysis of research evolution about cross-laminated timber. In this subject, the database of articles, journals, authorship over the last decade is systematically reported and discussed. However, the cross-laminated timber manufacturing should not be the scope of journal Automation. The topics should be the development of automation systems by theory, algorithms, network, sensing, etc. After reading the manuscript, the reviewer thinks the technological system of bibliometric and scientometric analysis could be reviewed more. Other comments are listed below, based on the present article:
1. The title is for cross-laminated timber manufacturing, but the article does not show the fundamentals of structural design, construction procedure, and cost estimation of this scheme. Besides, the paper does not visualize the processes of Construction 4.0. In fact, this paper is a bibliometric analysis. So the title is needed to be amended.
2. In the future trend of timber manufacturing in construction, please also cite some recent review articles about the ways for improvement of renewable performance (e.g. vibration energy harvesting, thermal insulations) of wood. A few references are recommended below for discussion:
(1) Chen, J., Qiu, Q., Han, Y., & Lau, D. (2019). Piezoelectric materials for sustainable building structures: Fundamentals and applications. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 101, 14-25.
(2) Kosny, J., Asiz, A., Smith, I., Shrestha, S., & Fallahi, A. (2014). A review of high R-value wood framed and composite wood wall technologies using advanced insulation techniques. Energy and Buildings, 72, 441-456.
3. On page 2, for “Nevertheless, the difference in this article is the comparison between two construction-related fields. This study intends to analyze the current state of both fields in construction, CLT, and Industry 4.0, so it is possible to identify the research gap from a manufacturing perspective.”, the original contribution of this work should be emphasized. Compared to previous bibliometric studies, how is the development of this research in resolving the gap?
4. On page 5, line 8, please explain the technological principles and basis of “networking visualizations”.
5. In figure 3, please specify the meaning of different colors (e.g. red, blue) in the caption or inside the figure.
6. On page 16, in discussing “The fact that these two last authors have been researching in this field in the last years means the importance of CLT in construction, but the centrality metric and the node sizes still suggest higher collaborations among researchers.”, the importance of CLT research depends on the engineering demand in the field, instead of the author’s credit. The collaborations among researchers should be associated with the technological development, funding, theory, etc., not just motivated by centrality metric and node size.
7. On page 34, for “It is conceivable to find a few journals on topics related to sustainability, but it is practically null the num-ber of publications for topics like manufacturing or automation. Therefore, a quick anal-ysis of the field of Industry 4.0 and construction is needed to understand the knowledge network and its trends.”, for discussing the sustainability of wood construction, it is suggested to consider the issues or topics of fire resistance, durability, defect detection, strengthening/retrofit. Can these researach gaps be correlated with the digital platform, i.e., the Construction 4.0?
Author Response
The authors would like to thank Reviewer 3 for taking the time in this article. Even though the writers would agree on placing the review articles in a construction related journal, this specific issue covers digital twin which is one of the main findings for Construction 4.0 with CLT. That’s why we consider the current article fits in this volume. The following comments have been addressed as follow:
- The title of the articles has been updated to mention the scientometric analysis and the word ‘manufacturing’ has been removed to avoid confusion.
- The authors agreed to include one of the papers recommended but they will not pursue a further work in this topic as it could take the work out of scope, and extend an already long journal.
- Albeit there have been others bibliometric and scientometric analyses of CLT or Construction 4.0, or even Industry 4.0, there has been no work which compared both fields to understand the research gap. Moreover, this article is limited to be a review and finding the research gaps is only purpose in this work. There should be other articles developed in the future for the gaps found to actually close them.
- The writers have changed the word ‘networking’ for ‘network’ to avoid possible confusion, and a brief description was added in the text.
- The color code is automatically assigned depending on the clusters by VOSviewer as seen in Figure 3. The comment has been added in line 223.
- The authors agree that the reason behind each academic work is an engineering or scientific demand. Yet, being this a scientometric review, we are limited to mention the facts of the metrics, in this case the centrality of the network map. For this reason, the writers mention in the conclusion that our findings are limited and that interrogating the reasons, “why” and “how”, of each academic works is out of the scope of this study.
- The authors consider that these interesting topics of sustainability could be correlated to the digital platform for Construction 4.0, but for a field of sensors and not that much of automation or manufacturing. As just said, this research could be worth looking for its own paper but the current work will not cover pursue the topic.
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
Some mistakes in the article have been corrected and the authors answer the questions well. The good quality of the presentation justifies the acceptance of this paper. By the way, please further check the bibliography as some references are repeatedly written, like [14] and [18], [55] and [77], [111] and [112].
