We wish to thank Prof. R. Piltner for his valuable comments, and our responses are as follows:
(1) The two almost identical papers in question are as follows: (i) A high precision element with a central circular hole '', published in International Journal of Solids and Structures (IJSS), hereafter called paper 1 [3]. (ii) Development of two-dimensional elements with a central circular hole'', published in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering (CMAME), hereafter called paper 2 [4]
. In order to better understand the dierences of these two papers, there is a need to explain the chronological sequence of the two papers being prepared. Paper 2, in which one eight-node rectangular element (WCH-R8-1) and one eight-node circular element (WCH-C8-1) were developed, was written ®rst. After submission of this paper for publication, we realized that element WCH-R8-1 can be improved and our further research gave rise to a better rectangular element called WCH-R8-2. We decided to write another paper (i.e., paper 1) to describe and compare the WCH-R8-1 and WCH-R8-2 elements. In fact, paper 2 was reference 4 on paper 1's reference list. (Note that the title of paper 2 was slightly changed based on the reviewer's comment and the Journal name was dierent due to our decision to change the Journal for submission.) I reproduce the following passages in paper 1 to show how paper 2 was quoted:
(a) With reference to the Introduction of paper 1, the following was stated: Soh and Long (1998) have proposed two new element types, one is an eight-node rectangular element with a central circular hole and the other is an eight-node circular element also with a hole . . .'' (b) With reference to the Conclusions of paper 1, the following was stated: The results obtained by this element type are in extremely good agreement with the theoretical solutions and superior to the corresponding results obtained by Soh and Long (1998) using similar types of elements.'' In short, paper 2 was our ®rst paper and it was appropriately referenced in paper 1. In any case, we fully agreed that it would be better if the two papers were formatted in a very dierent manner.
(2) It is indeed negligence on our side for missing some important references. The problem arose because when the work was carried out we were not aware that our proposed method was classi®ed as a Tretz method and, hence, we missed some of the related papers. This negligence was mainly due to the fact that the development of the proposed element was a spin-o from our project, entitled ``Size and clustering