Exploring the Major Trends and Emerging Themes of Artificial Intelligence in the Scientific Leading Journals amidst the COVID-19 Era
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This article employs an integrated bibliometric analysis to analyze, map, and outline the key trends and themes of articles published in the leading AI academic journals between 2020 and 2021. The idea is generally good, however, the following points are listed for quality improvement.
1) This paper does not have much relationship with covid-19. So, there is no need to mention this context.
2) Furthermore, I think the time span can be extended to about 5 years, e.g. 2017-2022. Under only two years, we can not observe too much substantive change in this broad AI field. With about 5 years, you can analyze much deeper change in the research trend, model architecture, target domain, etc.
3) Indeed, the complete AI domain is too broad. I suggested a little categorizing work will be helpful, e.g. CV, NLP, …
4) As a review type paper, only bibliometric analysis is not enough, and this will be too superficial. More concise summarization and discussion are needed to provide some valuable insights for readers.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer
We would like to thank you for acknowledging the merit of our paper. Thanks again for the constructive comments that help improve the paper significantly. We have carefully considered your comments and suggestions, and made further improvements to the manuscript.
Authors.
Author Response File: Author Response.DOC
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper is titled – “Exploring the Major Trends and Emerging Themes of Artificial Intelligence in the Scientific Leading Journals amidst the COVID-19 Era”. This work aims to specify the research progress on AI among the top-tier journals by highlighting the development of its trends, topics, and key themes. This article employs an integrated bibliometric analysis using evaluative and relational metrics to analyze, map, and outline the key trends and themes of articles published in the leading AI academic journals based on the latest CiteScore of Scopus-indexed journals between 2020 and 2021. The findings depict the major trends, conceptual and social structures, and key themes of AI leading journals’ publications during the given period. The work seems novel. However, the presentation of the paper needs improvement. It is suggested that the authors make the necessary changes/updates to their paper as per the following comments:
1. In the context of the discussion about COVID-19, the authors just state – “contagious and dangerous disease” and nothing else to support these claims. These claims about the virus are true but should be supported with data such as the number of worldwide cases, deaths, etc.
2. The authors' state – “the detection, diagnosis, screening, classification, prediction, and forecast of the virus” in the context of applications of AI and COVID-19, but just 1 paper is cited to support this statement. There was a significant amount of research done in this field. So, citing more than 1 paper is strongly encouraged. Furthermore, the authors don’t even mention other applications of AI, such as sentiment analysis of tweets about COVID-19 (https://doi.org/10.3390/covid2080076) and Google Trends-based analysis of COVID-19-related searches (https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10091718). It is suggested that the authors discuss such applications of AI and cite these recent papers and other papers related to such applications to support the discussions.
3. In Table 1, the authors have listed 10 journals based on the citation factor. There has been plenty of discussions and articles (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0253129) on whether open-access has an effect on citations. The authors should clarify whether all these journals are open-access or non-open-access. If some of them are open-access and some of them are non-open-access, then a discussion should be included on how selecting these journals just based on their citation score is a good enough criteria (assuming open-access has an effect on citations)?
4. Please provide more clarification regarding Table 5. Sometimes authors may have multiple affiliations. Or it is also possible one of the productive authors (Table 3) changed their affiliation in this time period. Are there any such cases that Table 5 also represents, or are all these affiliations compiled from the result of distinct authors working in these fields?
5. The comparison with prior/similar works should be improved to clearly highlight the novelty of the work
6. The references are not in MDPI format.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer
We would like to thank you for acknowledging the merit of our paper. Thanks again for the constructive comments that help improve the paper significantly. We have carefully considered your comments and suggestions, and made further improvements to the manuscript.
Authors.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
This paper deals with the review of the major trends and themes of AI during the COVID-19 era. Authors present the comprehensive review on leading Journals published in Scopus, and the key themes related to AI.
1. Even though authors' contribution is much and meaningful, authors should present more detailed research themes of AI rather than simply suggesting main keywords.
2. Authors should present detailed research issues and themes with one more Section. Keywords in Fig. 3 are very straightforward results that most everyone can expect.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer
We would like to thank you for acknowledging the merit of our paper. Thanks again for the constructive comments that help improve the paper significantly. We have carefully considered your comments and suggestions, and made further improvements to the manuscript.
Authors.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
All the comments are well addressed, thus I suggest this paper can be accepted with minor revision.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer
We would like to thank you for acknowledging the merit of our paper. Thanks again for the constructive comments that help improve the paper significantly. We have carefully considered your comments and suggestions, and made further improvements to the manuscript.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have revised the paper as per all my comments and feedback. I have a couple of comments at this point:
1. While the revision is comprehensive, the additional text that has been introduced in the paper has multiple grammatical errors and sentence construction errors.
2. The last section of the paper - "Limitations and future research" seems too long for a concluding section. I suggest renaming this section to "Conclusion and Future Scope of Work" and moving the limitations to a different section to minimize the length of the concluding section.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer
We would like to thank you for acknowledging the merit of our paper. Thanks again for the constructive comments that help improve the paper significantly. We have carefully considered your comments and suggestions, and made further improvements to the manuscript.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Authors are not respond my comment. The direction of this paper is not focused on the meaningful result. I suggest the detailed AI field and/or result is preferred in this Journal not a general expectable result. So, authors would revise the result section with more deep and detailed insight.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer
We would like to thank you for acknowledging the merit of our paper. Thanks again for the constructive comments that help improve the paper significantly. We have carefully considered your comments and suggestions, and made further improvements to the manuscript.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 3
Reviewer 3 Report
Authors provide the reply letter to reviewer's comment with marginal satisfactory revision. It is suggested to be accepted for publication as it is.
