Dear Professor Shen,

Regarding your e-mail of November 2, we again apologize for the
inconvenience.

In order to explain what happened we will try to sketch a chronological
path.

The research activity on this topic has produced incremental work during
the course of time.

Although in the context of a different application field we adopted the
same concept presented in the paper of "Akavipat, L.-S. Wu, F. Menczer"
in order to capture the peer similarity but the citation is missing.
Nevertheless, an extensive discussion of their contribution was reported
in an original section "Related Work".

Namely, the section "Related Work" of our initial paper was in the form
of the one [1] which reports the correct citations, but it was not
accepted for publication. As previously written, the mistake was made
during the editing process of the paper[2].

Unfortunately, two papers of the three you cited  [3],[4] were written
using this last paper or some subsequent version as baselines and this
caused a deplorable cascade effect. ( In the paper [5] the citation is
reported).

Some other papers [5], [6], and [7], that were based on the correct
version did report the proper citation.

Nevertheless it is our firm belief we are in error and we are willing to
repair in a way that you may suggest.

In the meantime, we have already arranged for the proper errata-corrige
to appear together with the complete publication list on our official
web-site hosted on the department web-server.

http://www.dinfo.unipa.it/en/nrg_publications

We are also contacting the authors in order to apologize directly.
Please find attached the mail to be sent to the authors.

We hope that after providing the proper explanations, they will
understand our good faith, and we may reach a friendly agreement.




Giuseppe Lo Re