Request for Guidance on Manuscript Revision

[Swati Goswami]

Dear all members and Neeraj Sir,

I am currently revising my manuscript on bibliometric analysis (using bibliographic coupling, co-occurrence analysis, and VOSviewer, based solely on Scopus data) for a journal.

The reviewers have raised the following concerns, and I request your guidance:

1. Methodological justification:
   "The thresholds for bibliographic coupling and co-occurrence (e.g., citation counts, document minimums) are not justified, the authors should clarify why these values were chosen and demonstrate that they do not bias the results. Likewise, the exclusive use of Scopus and English-language sources requires stronger rationale and together with a clearer discussion of how they affect the findings"

Since I cannot use another database at this stage, could you please suggest how to justify threshold limits and the English-only restriction, or share any reference papers that handle this issue?

1. Descriptive results:
   “The results section is largely descriptive rather than analytical or interpretive.”

Any examples or papers showing how to add analytical/theoretical interpretation to bibliometric clusters would be very helpful.

1. Figure and table captions:
   “Captions remain descriptive and do not explain the significance of the patterns.”
   
   

I would appreciate clarification on what is expected in captions and how to write them interpretively.

I had addressed some of these points in the first revision, but the reviewer has requested a more rigorous and explicit discussion of the potential biases and implications.

Thank you for your support.

Regards,
Swati Goswami