PONE-D-20-01624

The role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers

PLOS ONE

Dear Professor Thurner,

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: In this manuscript authors explore the bibliographic coupling network of the APS dataset in order to (1) identify mainstream, interdisciplinary and out-of-the-box scientific papers and (2) evaluate their performance over the past decades in terms of either absolute citations or citation rates. The paper is well written and well organized, the bibliography is exhaustive, the statistical analysis is rigorous and the results are interesting, convincing and well presented. Finally, the Data and Methods section and the Supporting Information material effectively contribute to clarify the procedures adopted. For all these reasons, in my opinion, the paper deserved publication on PLOSONE also in its present form.

Minor points:

-Figs.3(a) and (b) are not easily readable (in particular Figure 3(a)), since different green scales tend to confuse the reader; maybe it could be better to use just colored line profiles instead of filled boxes.

-References to the SI figures cited in the main text are missed (maybe it is a problem of latex compilation).

-In Ref.[7] the year is missed.

Reviewer #2: A remark: I think that interdisciplinary articles can be mainstream as well as out-of-the-box.

Interdisciplinarity is defined through the use of several PACS code, through weighted betweenness and also as being intermediate between clusters. Do these definitions coincide?

How is the center of a cluster defined? And how the periphery?

Page 2 line 54. It is not true that in general 67% of results in science cannot be reproduced. Please qualify this statement (and add reference).

Page 3 line 58. Write h-index (not h-factor)

Page 3 The authors discuss reasons why most scientists prefer incremental research. Yet, they do not mention that only few have the intellectual capacity to tackle the hard problems (most of us are not Einsteins).

Page 6 line 143 typo: interdiciplinary

Some references to figs in the SI are missing (??)

Page 9 line 275 Science of science is not a new field (although there is a revival of this term nowadays). Price already used this term and the term remained popular in China over the years.

Page 10 line 297 typo “fir” must be “for”

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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The role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers

PONE-D-20-01624R1

Dear Dr. Thurner,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it complies with all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you will receive an e-mail containing information on the amendments required prior to publication. When all required modifications have been addressed, you will receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will proceed to our production department and be scheduled for publication.

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With kind regards,

Wolfgang Glanzel, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #2: No