Before the Saeedi et al. [3] publication, RI has been employed for ecological risk assessment of heavy metals in soil and dust samples in several studies [4–9]. It has also been employed by researchers after this publication [10–15]. This shows that many researchers accept the view that RI is an appropriate and useful risk assessment index for some environments other than aquatic environment such as terrestrial one. However, the issues raised by Zhang et al. [1] could have been discussed and explained in our manuscript