Letter to the editor

Dear Editor,

In Chen et al. (2015), under “Material and Methods,” the authors noted that, “For the research on MSW, author keyword and word cluster analyses were made using Microsoft Excel 2007, and the Global Citation Scores (GCS) and Local Citation Scores (LCS) were acquired by using HistCite.” Katz and Hicks (1997) pointed out that, “the latest releases of PC software, such as Microsoft Excel, make it possible to develop graphical user interfaces into complex bibliometric data for a wide spectrum of researchers and policy analysts.” Microsoft Excel has been applied in the last decade by my coworkers and me for the analysis of scientific outputs, subject categories, journals, authors, countries, institutes, keywords, and word cluster analyses (Li and Ho 2008; Mao, Wang, and Ho 2010; Xie, Zhang, and Ho 2008; Zhang, Xie, and Ho 2010).

In Research emphasis: Author keywords, words in title, and KeyWords Plus, authors presented three figures including “Table 3. Top 30 most frequency of author keywords, 1997–2014.”, “Table 5. Top 20 most used single words in title, 1997–2014.”, and “Table 6. Top 30 most frequency of KeyWords Plus, 1997–2014.” Again, in the last decade, my coworkers and I proposed the distribution of words in the article title and abstract, author keywords, and KeyWords Plus in different periods (Xie, Zhang, and Ho 2008; Zhang, Xie, and Ho 2010); for example, a 2-year (Fu et al., 2014), a 4-year (Li et al. 2009), a 5-year (Ho and Ho 2015), and a 6-year (Ho, Satoh, and Lin 2010) interval, to evaluate trends in research topics.

Furthermore, “word cluster analysis” based on results of word analysis were also proposed (Mao, Wang, and Ho 2010) and applied in several research topics (Fu, Wang, and Ho 2013; Li et al. 2009). The concept of Tables 3, 5, and 6 in the original article (Chen et al. 2015) was presented in several research topics (Ho, Satoh, and Lin 2010; Li et al. 2009; Xie, Zhang, and Ho 2008). In recent years, similar rebuttals have also been published in Environmental Earth Sciences (Ho 2016a) and Scientometrics (Ho 2016b).

Similar comments have been reported (Ho 2016a, 2016b) that citing the original article is always recommended; it is not only respecting authors who presented a novel idea in research but also to read the original idea in the detail of the work (Ho 2014). When a scientific publication duplicates previously published idea, text, equations, or figures without any citations, it is frequently regarded as a sign of possible plagiarism (Hunter 1994; Noè and Batten 2006). In my view, Chen et al. (2015) should have cited the original article for what they mentioned in their article, thereby providing greater accuracy and information details about the idea and the methods that they employed.