Integration of Shared Micromobility into Public Transit: A Systematic Literature Review with Grey Literature

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The review is focused on bibliometric analysis of articles about shared micromobility and transit systems indexed in Web of Science, including a cluster analyses, and a common review of selected grey literature for the given topic. The focus is well selected and the topic should attract high interest of readers. However, it would be welcome to deeply elaborate the analysis. I hope some of comments given bellow may help authors to improve the results and the article.

Comments and recommendations:

Overall, it is preferred to elaborate a review not as a sequential list of contributions from individual papers, rather to discuss each topic or idea and document them by relevant references. Comparisons of results from papers, such as provided in Table 2, are highly evaluated.

The methodology should be more explained. Readers may not fully understand that bibliometric analysis was conducted only for WoS documents (presented in chapter 3) while grey literature is utilised only for an expert review (chapter 4).

In addition, more interpretation of descriptive results is highly welcome.

92 - The systematic literature review (SLR) approach is presented as the only (right) method to conduct a review. Could you compare it with e.g. PRISMA framework (Moher D, Liberati A, Tetzlaff J, Altman DG, The PRISMA Group. Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: the PRISMA statement. PLoS Med. 2009;6(7):97.)?

111 – SLR does not include specification of searched terms (keywords) but it is an essential step. How it is consistent with fig.2 where selection of searched terms (and creating their logical string) is presented?

131  - only WoS is analysed. Majority of scholars conduct similar analysis both in WoS and Scopus (with elimination of duplicated documents). Are there any special reason why Scopus is not included?

140 – Do you iterate searching as optionally recommended in SLR (see 104)?

156-172 not clear why these sources of grey literature were selected. Why not to use also WoS (switch to all databases)? Missing information how many documents (items) were selected and details about selection or filtering process.

174, 175 – consider to better specify titles of chapters (being focused only to WoS)

195, fig. 4 – consider improving the map. Choropleth maps should be used only for relative values and not for absolute counts due to the interpretation bias when large countries are overemphasized by large absolute values. In such cases e.g. areal density of the given phenomenon or population density are recommended. Or to use cartodiagram instead.

200, table 1 – it would be interesting to know how much relevant are journals. Consider calculating the share of selected publication from the total number in the given time period. Similarly for citations.

Table 1 is not referenced in the paper.

201-207 – consider to provide more interpretation

211-218 – consider to provide more interpretation. For instance, distinguish obligatory terms (those you searched) and newly discovered terms.

227 – provide, please, more information how was the cluster analyses conducted. What unsupervised method of clustering is used?

231 – how can we select 226 papers from 108?

282 Table 2 – the most important is to clearly identify sources for each row of the table. Please, repeat citation for any city/country or start each row with identification of the paper.

Cities are mixed with countries (Netherlands), also confusing number of inhabitants.

334 consider to change the title to better address the review from grey literature

387 Table 3 - Consider to round population to millions.

389 the subchapter is too small and it looks strange when no references are utilized

444 Conclusion – missing results of the review of the grey literature. Missing a final summary of answers for 5 established research questions (see 119-129).

Formating issues and typos:

48 - traffic.[3]

129-130 separate lines

133 - journals.[14].

141, 156 the same subchapter title

157 - [24]comprises

282 table 2 requires better formatting, namely clearly separation of rows (items)

296-302 different formatting

387 Table 3 consider better formatting

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you to the authors for the opportunity to review their work, and I appreciate the significant effort put into preparing the text. While the text is not highly innovative, it interestingly presents a general picture of the issue of Integration of Shared Micromobility with Public Transit. The article has a proper structure that meets the requirements of the Sustainability journal. Personally, I believe that systematic literature reviews, which aim to present and then generalize the results of published articles on a given topic, are much more interesting and valuable than those focusing on bibliographic analysis, such as the number of articles published on a topic in a particular journal. Below, I present a few comments regarding the content of the evaluated article:

One of the most valuable parts of the article is table no. 2. However, it needs to be improved in many respects, e.g.:

• Currently, the order of the articles presented in it seems to be random, it would be worthwhile to organize its content, for example, chronologically.

• It would be worthwhile to add some of the latest literature, as currently, only three presented items are not older than 2020.

• in some cases, there are missing references to the literature sources.

• The "Main conclusions" part needs to be corrected, the current records, e.g., "50% respondents reducing rail use", "44% respondents reducing rail use" do not allow to determine what the conclusions of a given article really look like. It is not known what was diagnosed as the cause of these changes.

The text should include sections that introduce and explain the reason for the appearance of specific tables and figures in the article. Currently, these elements are missing with respect to tables 1 and 2, but table 3 has it. There is also a lack of reference in the text to figure 2.

The text mentions, "Table 3 compares cities in the U.S., Canada, Finland, and China with varying levels of transit and shared micromobility payment integration." However, there is no information on why these particular countries were analyzed.

If possible, it would be worthwhile to add information in table 3 regarding the effects of specific actions and programs. The text states, "Payment integration enables seamless multimodal travel and fare integration, making trips more economical and appealing.". It would be valuable to evaluate this statement and, based on the presented case studies, show data that either confirm or negate the correctness of this statement.

The text mentions, "The software VOSviewer generated a network of co-occurring keywords from 108 articles, representing content as nodes. […] In 2022, "data," "micromobility," and "modal shift" were frequently encountered terms (Fig.5)." It lacks information on the implications and potential causes of this finding. Should this be considered a coincidence, a change in researchers' interests after analyzing the topics, a change in the main urban transport problems, a change in the ways of solving the main urban transport problems, or something else?

An attempt to generalize the results contained in the analyzed articles is the subsection "Assessment and effectiveness of the integration". In this entire subsection, only 7 source articles were demonstrated. It is difficult to determine why the authors decided to use exactly these literature items to create this section, omitting the others.

The abstract contains the statement, "To explore this topic, a systematic literature review was conducted to consolidate knowledge, analyze research achievements and best practices, and provides future research recommendations" Based on this, the reader might expect that the text will contain the best practices in the field of studying the integration of Shared Micromobility with Public Transit. In the conclusions, it would be worthwhile to indicate which methods or ways of studying the links between public transport and micromobility were most often used in the analyzed articles.

I hope that the above comments will not be taken by the authors as nitpicking, but as an attempt to help improve their text.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I find it an interesting paper. Good search approach. They have found relevant papers and they seem complete. I would only think that they could be far more critical of the papers they have found. That is also what I mean with my two stars. Mind you, I do not mean that they are not misleading but they are just not critical. What about the quality of the analyses found? What is according to this review needed for research in this field to bring this field further? I think this could be discussed far sharper and more concretely.   

Author Response

Thank you for your constructive feedback on our paper. We appreciate your recognition of our search methodology and the comprehensiveness of our literature selection. We acknowledge your concerns regarding the critical analysis of the sources we've included. Your insights are invaluable, and we agree that a more rigorous critique of the existing literature's analytical quality would enhance the paper's depth.

In response to your suggestions, we will revisit the literature with a more critical eye, evaluating the robustness of methodologies and the validity of conclusions drawn in the papers reviewed. Additionally, we will incorporate a section discussing the future direction of research in this field, identifying specific areas that require further inquiry and elaboration to advance understanding and application.

We aim to sharpen our analysis and provide concrete recommendations for future research, thereby offering a clearer roadmap for the field's progression. Your input will guide significant improvements in our revision, and we hope the updated version will address your concerns more thoroughly.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks authors to answer my questions and comments, and accept majority of the proposed changes.

Two last small recommendations:

200 Fig. 4 The caption should be changed according to the new status – currently this figure contains only publications and not citations.

514-556 Answers for 5 established research questions (RQs) – consider to use more fluent style of answering RQs; I think it is not necessary to repeat formulation of each RQ.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I thank the authors for precisely addressing all the comments I made about the text in the first round of review. The corrections made have improved the text sufficiently, in my opinion, to justify its publication. As a reviewer, however, I would like to submit a few further comments under the consideration of the authors and the editor, which in my opinion could contribute to improving the quality of the text:

• Currently, the research questions are presented only on page 3 of the text. Personally, it is largely the content of the research questions that I base my decision on whether to familiarize myself with the entirety of the text or not. Therefore, it is a good practice to place research questions in the abstract or introduction.

• The text lacks information regarding the methods of selecting grey literature, intended to weed out sources whose content, methodology, or substantive value may be debatable.

• I have the impression that some footnotes in the bibliography are incomplete and do not contain all the elements that a footnote should include, for example:

17 K. Börner, “Science of science studies: Sci2 Tool,” 2011.

19 P. A.-W. Harzing, “The Publish or Perish Book,” 2010.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

They processed my comments wells

Author Response

Thanks for your review.