Trends in Soil Science over the Past Three Decades (1992–2022) Based on the Scientometric Analysis of 39 Soil Science Journals
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
I have one general comment and a few specific ones.
Generaly.
The assessment of trends in publications in the field of soil science should be performed in relation to the situation in related sciences, for example hydrology, geology or agricultural chemistry. Meanwhile, there is actually only one mention in the work about the situation in other fields of science (line 262). The observed increase in the number of published articles, the increase in the number of journals and the increase in the number of citations may partly reflect the demographic explosion of the last 50 years and the entry of scientists from many developing countries into the scientific market.
I think it would be appropriate to mention the names of the authors of the largest number of publications in the field of soil science (lines 353-355).
I also think it would be beneficial if data on the average number of citations per year were included in Table 3. This would point to publications that are likely to have the highest number of citations in the near future.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
Generally, the manuscript documents a huge amount of work and meaningful data mining and data evaluations. I have three major points of criticism:
1. Journal selection is not optimal for purpose (to analyse publishing in Soil Sciences). Why: not restricted to "soil science only"-journals. Including, e.g. Biochar (published for many years by a Chinese University) likely makes a strong bias towards China. The journal globally has been unknown before taken over by a big international publishing house (this bias is my ethical concern).
2. For finding out how important soil/soil science is considered in a certain society it whould habe been very informative to normalize the numbers by number of inhabitants or by GDP.
3. The many error notes in the manuscript likely produced by upload software make is really difficult for a reviewer to smoothely read through the manuscript. Sometimes I thought "give up and reject as immature and not ready for review.
More detailled comments below:
l 19: "increasing trend" is unclear. It can be the trend of an increase in numbers etc. - wording not exact.
l 21: "ecological environment" as well is ambiguous. What exactly is meant? Be more precise in explanation.
l 23: "fairer evaluation ..." compared to what? The points raised at l 23-24 have been challenges all time, not specific for current soil science journals.
l 23-27: I doubt these general statements. … Will see if authors really can meet my expectation from these statements.
l. 42: I do not agree with the statement in this line: Soil as such does not provide a scientific basis - maybe soil sciences but not the soil as such.
l 53: I do think this is not completely correct: some of these journal accommodated also topics that are not soil science such as agronomy (Archives of ..; Acta Agriculturae .., Soil Sci. & Plant Nutrition), or technical applications of clays, e.g. for basement of dump site or use as base material for ceramics (Clays and Clay Minerals). Statement can be correct if l 52 call it "number of journals”. To the best of my knowledge there are more journals in this category like Journal of Plant Nutrition and Soil Science founded 1922, afterwards renamed several times, called Zeitschrift für Pflanzenernährung und Bodenkunde in 1967, and entitled in English language since 1999. Therefore, I propose to delete the number eight, as it is incorrect in soil science compared to other sciences.
l 78: No evidence provided for statement about self-citation rate
l 95-98: This is not objective but outlook, and therefore misplaced here
l 101: Dot makes it into 2 sentences which is wrong here
l 112: "early access"? Is that correct? I have been editor of one of the journal discussed but never came across about such a publication type. "early access" is that different from the other publication types mentioned. No – it is just a temporal state (between acceptance and release). Also, I recommend ordering the article types according to size/importance starting with proceedings (smallest in size) and ending with review article (largest volume and information).
l 131: Reference is missing here. Where are these results presented?
l 140-141: References for these statements are missing here. Where are these data from?
l 105 "group, respectively" makes it clearer
l 175: Multi journal submission is to be excluded by most of the prestigious journals. Authors must declare not to have submitted the same text to another journal.
l 179: I do think this is outside the scope of the article which is restricted to soil science journals.
l 193: Is "Biochar" really a soil science journal? See how journal describes it´s scope: "As the first journal specifically focusing on biochar, the journal Biochar covers multidisciplinary subjects of agronomy, environmental science, and materials science. It is a fully OA journal and the APCs of papers accepted before Dec 31,2022 are fully covered by Shenyang Agricultural University. The journal seeks to publish original research in the fields of preparation and processing of biochar and its multifunctional applications including bioenergy production, biochar-based materials for environmental applications, soil improvement, climate change, contaminated-environment remediation, water purification, new analytical techniques, life cycle assessment, and importantly, rural and regional development, etc. It devoted to serve as an innovative, efficient and professional platform for researchers in the area of biochar around the world to deliver findings from this rapidly expanding field of science": Word "soil" is not mentioned. Involving this journal into evaluation is a strong bias towards China. Falsifies the whole data set! Without deleting this, I cannot recommend acceptance.
l 209: Again, a reference is missing here - meaning of ( )?
l 213-214: Statement is meaningless if data are not shown. IF goes up and down sometimes; so the period is important to which this statement refers to is important as well.
l 217: Meaning of error comment?
l 219: O.K. I see the meaning of early access, likely accepted but not yet released.
l 230: Again crazy error notice, and TC needs to be explained
l 235: I do not think that journal can recognize articles. It is always scientists ... people not paper.
Table 2: As I stated before Biochar is not a soil science journal. Pls remove from this data evaluation.
l 265: I am really upset about this (Error! Reference source not found.a, Error! Reference source not found.aError! Reference 265 source not found.a). With so many errors, a manuscript is not ready for review. Editors should have seen this and asked authors for correction before sending out to reviewers.
l 269: The first 2 are not soil science journal sensu strictu. They must be excluded from this evaluation. Otherwise the whole approach is biased.
Fig. 6: This is biased by different regional categories: For instance if you compare USA versus England, Scotland, Wales the better approach would be compare USA versus UK (or Federal States in US versus England, Scotland, Wales). Same with provinces in China; or EU with US and China. Fragmentation in the one region and hedging in the other is bias.
P 12: "Kiel University" is the correct name of Prof. R. Horn´s affiliation
l 353-354: This sentence is incomplete and, thus, makes no sense.
l 371-372: This conclusion is not the full truth in my view. Soil C is a simplification for soil organic matter. Soil organic matter - for long time called "humus" has been considered as key factor of soil fertility in the sense of productivity (… for crop growth). New journal “Biochar” should not be included in this evaluation as it is not a soil science journal.
"Carbon neutrality" also is a biased explanation of a much more complex problem.
l 423, Table 4: There are some errors in Table:
“nitrogen mineralization” and “N mineralization” is almost the same (though differently written).
"losse" likely is "loess" (an aeolic sediment composed mainly of silt-size particles)
Also I do not think that "organic carbon" and "soil organic carbon" should be distinguished in this context. Meaning is the same ....
l 430-436: Development in molecular genetic methods, and their application to soil need to be mentioned here as a factor that drove this development.
l 446: The fact that authors followed in their ranking into quartiles an approach by Chinese Acad. Sciences must be mentioned in the beginning (under Methods). Much too late here after all this evaluations based on the Quartiles.
This first paragraph is scarcely related to author´s data evaluations. I cannot see why they wrote this paragraph. Same is true for the next paragraph (l 456-466): No link to author´s data evaluations.
l 473: I do think reference to ethic is to strong here. Unethical behaviour is criticized in one of the references, but issue was bringing genetic material out of Indonesia without involving local people/authorities. Obviously that was not soil research, just mentioned in a soil science journal as an example for so-called "helicopter research". Linking this to soil science is somehow incorrect in my view.
l 494: I do not think that China any longer can be called an "underdeveloped country". Either base this on objective data (globally accepted) or delete this example.
p 26 l 4: Add here “39 ... soil science … journals”
l 6: I do not think that this can be concluded from the previous sentences.
p 27, l 45-48: In my view, these final conclusions are not unequivocally derived from the author´s data analyses.
Comments on the Quality of English Language
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Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
The authors have adequatly responded to all my comments. I recommend the revised version for publication.
