Who Will Establish New Trade Relations? Looking for Potential Relationship in International Nickel Trade

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This study provided a method for forecasting international nickel ore trade relationship. The research results have good practical application value, and also has a certain reference significance for researchers in related research fields. Some minor modifications are proposed as follows:
1.In the introduction, the research motivation and purpose of this paper need to be explained more clearly, and the innovative contributions of this paper need to be listed point by point.
2. In Pages 1: "scholar A" should be "Anna Hulda Olafsdottir et al".
3. In Pages 2 : "scholar D" should be "Dong X et al".
4. In Figure 2, Step 4, "ofinexistent"  should be "of inexistent".
5. In Equation (13), the second eqution and the first eqution is the same of "D_t=E_t"? what is the mean of E_t?
6. A title for column should be added to column 1 of Table 1, such as "NO.".
7. In Pages 9 : "Fig 4" should be "Fig. 4" or Figure 4".
8. In Pages 12 : Missing punctuation at the end of paragraph 1.
9. In row 424 of Pages 14 : "Figure 6" should be "Figure 7".
Finally, it is suggested to carefully check the language of the full text.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer:
We appreciate your willingness to take the time to give constructive comments and useful suggestions on our article, so that we can improve the manuscript. we have undertaken a thorough revision of the manuscript, which is titled “Who will establish new trade relations? Looking for potential relationship in international nickel trade”. We hope that this revision meets the standards of Sustainability. Please see the attachment for the point by point reply to the reviewer's comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This article analyzes the relationship in the international nickel (Ni) ore sand trade. The experimental results showed that some regions are most likely to establish trade relations within five years. The main problem of this article is that the relationship between this study and sustainability is not clear. Hence, I don't know why this work is suitable to publish in the sustainability journal. More related discussions are needed. Moreover, this work lacks a comprehensive comparison with the associated results.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer:
We appreciate your willingness to take the time to give constructive comments and useful suggestions on our article, so that we can improve the manuscript. we have undertaken a thorough revision of the manuscript, which is titled “Who will establish new trade relations? Looking for potential relationship in international nickel trade”. We hope that this revision meets the standards of Sustainability. Please see the attachment for the point by point reply to the reviewer's comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The revised article has been addressed and solved all of my comments. Hence, I think that the revised paper can be accepted for publication.