Review Reports - Risk Governance and Sustainability: A Scientometric Analysis and Literature Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The given review article is devoted to the analysis of the publication activity of researchers on problems related to the management of large systems and the specifics of their sustainable development. This is undoubtedly a good article that analyzes in detail an array of more than 1000 papers on this issue published since the end of the 20th century to the present time, and it seems to me that in terms of its content and level of systematization of the material, it is quite worthy of publication in Sustainability after making small adjustments indicated below.

1 In the Abstract and the text of the article (see p. 2, line 64), 1156 articles on the problem considered in the article are mentioned, however, in the list of references (pp. 12-14) only 79 publications are cited. It would be highly desirable to at least briefly explain why the authors cited namely these particular publications, and not any other publications, the total number of which is much larger. It is also a good idea to provide numerical data showing the distribution of all these publications by individual countries (in the form of a table), since this information is not currently available in the article.

2 There are technical questions on the list of references

- Ref. 9: it is not clear what this cited source of information is - an article, monograph or something else. If this is an article, then authors need to indicate its full output data, and not be limited to only indicating the year of publication of the journal where it was published. If it is a monograph, then a link to it on the Internet should be provided.

- Ref. 18: the number 2021 is indicated twice.

- Ref. 21: it is not clear what is written: "36 2" or "362".

- Refs. 54, 74 and 78 are incomplete (each of them lacks the number of the corresponding article).

3 There is a mistake in the last word of the Abstract section: it was written “develpment”, it should be written “development”.

Author Response

Dear editors, dear reviewers,

Re: Manuscript ID sustainability-1380123

Firstly, please accept our many thanks for all your hard work!

Thank you very much for your attention and the reviewers’ evaluation and comments on our manuscript "Risk governance and sustainability: A scientometric and literature review". They are highly insightful and enabled us to enhance the quality of our manuscript. We have revised it according to all your kind advice and please find our point-by-point responses to each of your comments below. We sincerely hope this manuscript will be finally accepted to be published in your journal.

To begin, the accuracy of author names has been checked. Secondly, the funding data and acknowledgements have been checked.

Revisions in the text are shown using yellow highlight for additions, and red fond for important changes. Point-to-point responses:

Review 1 Report

„The given review article is devoted to the analysis of the publication activity of researchers on problems related to the management of large systems and the specifics of their sustainable development. This is undoubtedly a good article that analyzes in detail an array of more than 1000 papers on this issue published since the end of the 20th century to the present time, and it seems to me that in terms of its content and level of systematization of the material, it is quite worthy of publication in Sustainability after making small adjustments indicated below.“

Thank you very much for this comment.

“In the Abstract and the text of the article (see p. 2, line 64), 1156 articles on the problem considered in the article are mentioned, however, in the list of references (pp. 12-14) only 79 publications are cited. It would be highly desirable to at least briefly explain why the authors cited namely these particular publications, and not any other publications, the total number of which is much larger. It is also a good idea to provide numerical data showing the distribution of all these publications by individual countries (in the form of a table), since this information is not currently available in the article.”

Author Response:

We add a table (Table 1, line 108) to show the distribution of the publications by countries. There are authors from 101 countries contributing to the 1156 articles. We list those countries with paper outputs of over 20.

For the cited publications, as we add part 5 in the manuscript, now it has 15 additional references. Considering the risk governance and sustainability research are quite interdisciplinary and literatures are very fragmented in topics, after the cluster analysis (see Fig. 4), we searched and read the most relevant articles related to the 5 research themes. Unfortunately, after considering the manuscript to be concise and condense, many articles with case studies from a country, a region, or one sector were not referred to, methodology papers (e.g., numerical modeling) are mostly not referred to. Still, our reading work could continue for each research theme, for future detailed reviews of separate themes.

2.“There are technical questions on the list of references

- Ref. 18: the number 2021 is indicated twice.

- Ref. 21: it is not clear what is written: "36 2" or "362".

- Refs. 54, 74 and 78 are incomplete (each of them lacks the number of the corresponding article).”

Author Response:

Thank you very much for your careful reading and detailed advice. We have checked and aligned all the references accordingly (marked red) and add the source of information wherever necessary.

Ref. 18 (Line 586), Ref. 21 (Line 592), Ref. 54 (Line 661), Ref. 74 (Line 705) and Ref. 78 (Line 714) have been adjusted and marked in red.

“There is a mistake in the last word of the Abstract section: it was written “develpment”, it should be written “development”. ”

Author Response:

Many thanks. This has been corrected (Line 26). We also checked other grammar and spelling mistakes in the manuscript. Those changes have been marked in red.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The present study can be accepted to be published

Author Response

Review 2 Report

“The present study can be accepted to be published”

Author Response:

Many many thanks for your positive feedback!

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

Your manuscript is a systematic literature review in an area of exponentially growing interest. In essence, you have chosen a good topic area to review. However, the review scope appears to be rather broad and is not segmented by public versus private sector. It is not segmented by specific industry and it is not segmented by geopolitical context.

The methodology does not specify the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the literature. This is a reasonably major oversight as I believe it is essential for this study to be much smaller in size and the best way to do this is to focuss the review on a specific group of papers well defined by specific exclusion and inclusion criteria. The concepts of risk governance and sustainability can be applied to a multitude of scenarios from public sector policy development at a municiple government level to the private sector startup companies. It could also be applied in the not for profit sector. Each of these scenarios presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities especially when various industry sectors are taken into account, various geopolitical regimes are examined and specific local issues are understood. My view is that this literature review, as it stands, is too broad to be meaningful. The analysis presents several interesting visual analysis tools that are of passing interest but do not appear to offer substantive information that can be used to guide further research, public policy, business decisions or industry governance processes. This is exemplified in the general language and complete lack of case study references found in the discussion.

Several visual analysis tools have been employed and are briefly mentioned in the "Data and Method" section. These tools offer a great visual insight into the nature of research already undertaken. However, there is not enough quantitative analysis emanating from the tools. For example, a quantitative analysis of the co-operation between key countries, institutions and authors would be useful. Another example is that line 128 mentions "the research clusters lack integration to some degree". Can you provide a relative measure of integration that can be used to quantify this statement? Are you able to provide a quantitative citation analysis which reveals the most important authors (by number of citations) and the themes that they discuss?

My opinion is that it would be far more appropriate to segment this review into several smaller, more targeted, studies. Perhaps starting with a singular study that uses a subset of the literature already captured, analysed and discussed. My strong suggestion is therefore to use one or more of the inclusion / exclusion criterion I suggest above so as to focus the study on a specific area. Naturally, such a change would be a major undertaking and would require a major revision to the paper as it stands.

Finally, I did a review of the spelling and grammar in one paragraph (see below where I detail the errors found in the first paragraph of the introduction). I found four spelling and grammar problems. Assuming this is indicative of the entire manuscript, there would be approximately 120 spelling and grammar errors.

Line 32

challenge
whole human race

Line 33

delete ever (implies no time limit)

line 37

Such an unpridictable event

Kind regards.

Author Response

Dear editors, dear reviewers,

Re: Manuscript ID sustainability-1380123

Firstly, please accept our many thanks for all your hard work!

To begin, the accuracy of author names has been checked. Secondly, the funding data and acknowledgements have been checked.

Revisions in the text are shown using yellow highlight for additions, and red fond for important changes. Point-to-point responses:

Review 3 Report

“Your manuscript is a systematic literature review in an area of exponentially growing interest. In essence, you have chosen a good topic area to review. However, the review scope appears to be rather broad and is not segmented by public versus private sector. It is not segmented by specific industry and it is not segmented by geopolitical context.”

Author Response:

Thank you for your comment. I agree the review scope of this manuscript is a little broad. But the purpose of writing it is to review the intersection field of risk governance and sustainability, and figure out the features of this resesarch field and relationships of the two concepts. Trying to be concise and condense in texts, we did not expand discussions for geopolitical context, and sector application examples are only mentioned (e.g., Line 471) when it is necessary to consolidate the arguments.

Indeed, the segmentation by public versus private sector is a great idea, which is added in part 5, providing a comparative and relational perspective addressing sustainability-related objectives and risk governance.

“The methodology does not specify the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the literature. This is a reasonably major oversight as I believe it is essential for this study to be much smaller in size and the best way to do this is to focuss the review on a specific group of papers well defined by specific exclusion and inclusion criteria. The concepts of risk governance and sustainability can be applied to a multitude of scenarios from public sector policy development at a municiple government level to the private sector startup companies. It could also be applied in the not for profit sector. Each of these scenarios presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities especially when various industry sectors are taken into account, various geopolitical regimes are examined and specific local issues are understood. My view is that this literature review, as it stands, is too broad to be meaningful. The analysis presents several interesting visual analysis tools that are of passing interest but do not appear to offer substantive information that can be used to guide further research, public policy, business decisions or industry governance processes. This is exemplified in the general language and complete lack of case study references found in the discussion.”

Author Response:

1) The inclusion criteria are re-clarified (Lines 63-71). After the cluster analysis (see Fig. 4), we searched and read the most relevant articles related to the 5 research themes. Still, our reading work could continue for each research theme, for future detailed reviews of separate themes. Case studies and summary of methodologies need to be discussed in our next paper. This manuscript only touched climate governance and sustainability.

2) The multitude of scenarios brought by the risk governance and sustainability is very interesting. However, due to our research limitations, this article is just a beginning to clarify the relationships of the two concepts based on the emerged 5 correlating research themes.

“Several visual analysis tools have been employed and are briefly mentioned in the "Data and Method" section. These tools offer a great visual insight into the nature of research already undertaken. However, there is not enough quantitative analysis emanating from the tools. For example, a quantitative analysis of the co-operation between key countries, institutions and authors would be useful. Another example is that line 128 mentions "the research clusters lack integration to some degree". Can you provide a relative measure of integration that can be used to quantify this statement? Are you able to provide a quantitative citation analysis which reveals the most important authors (by number of citations) and the themes that they discuss?”

Author Response:

Thank you for your insightful comments.

1) Line 128 "the research clusters lack integration to some degree" has been deleted in the text. This sentence came out of no valid evidence. We just wanted to empasize the heterogeneity of the risk governance and sustainability research. And in Part 6 (Line 508), the interconnectedness of these clusters was explained.

2) Figure 2 and 3 (network visualization) illustrate the geographic and institutional focus on the line of research.

You are right about the citation discussion. The scientometric analysis normally presents the highly cited literatures and the most important authors. Actually, we have tried. But our dataset (the 1156 articles) showed no outstandings with too diverse and multi-disciplinary topics converging. Then our focus is on the 5 emerged research themes and how they link to the risk governance and sustainability, while we did not find the citation analysis with additional useful information, as the citations are divided into different disciplines, sectors and sub-directions (but not necessarily related to risk governance and sustainability).

“My opinion is that it would be far more appropriate to segment this review into several smaller, more targeted, studies. Perhaps starting with a singular study that uses a subset of the literature already captured, analysed and discussed. My strong suggestion is therefore to use one or more of the inclusion / exclusion criterion I suggest above so as to focus the study on a specific area. Naturally, such a change would be a major undertaking and would require a major revision to the paper as it stands.”

Author Response:

Thanks for your valuable advice, which gives us a clearer direction for future research. This manuscript is just an explorative study, the segmentation (for example, environmental risk governance and transformation) could go much deeper and then provoke critical thinking about risk governance and sustainability, which will offer more substantive information attracted to policy-makers and practitioners.

“Finally, I did a review of the spelling and grammar in one paragraph (see below where I detail the errors found in the first paragraph of the introduction). I found four spelling and grammar problems. Assuming this is indicative of the entire manuscript, there would be approximately 120 spelling and grammar errors.

Line 32

challenge
whole human race

Line 33

delete ever (implies no time limit)

line 37

Such an unpridictable event”

Author Response:

Thank you very much for your careful reading. These mistakes have all been corrected. We also checked other grammar and spelling mistakes in the manuscript. Several rounds of language corrections have been made, the changes of which are marked in red.

Again, thank you very much for all your work and looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Yours sincerely,

Huijie Li & Jie Li

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

Thank you for responding to all of the issues raised.

You have indicated that this is purposely designed as a broad study with the main purpose being "... to review the intersection field of risk governance and sustainability, and figure out the features of this research field and relationships of the two concepts." I accept this, however, there needs to be a significant contribution.

A suggested contribution would be the logical development of some recommended future research directions which you derive from your findings and analysis and which you present at the latter part of the discussion.

You have hinted at something like this in your response:

"Still, our reading work could continue for each research theme, for future detailed reviews of separate themes. Case studies and summary of methodologies need to be discussed in our next paper."

I see the necessity to articulate this in much more detail in your manuscript and thereby provide other researchers with the ability to build from your good work.

With thanks and kind regards.

Author Response

Dear editors, dear reviewers,

Re: Manuscript ID sustainability-1380123

Thank you very much for your carefully reading and insightful comments, which are quite important to enhance the quality of our manuscript. We have revised it according to all your kind advice and please find our point-by-point response to your comments below. We sincerely hope this manuscript will be finally accepted to be published in your journal.

Revisions in the text are shown using yellow highlight for additions with “Track Changes”, Lines 948-976 are newly added. Point-to-point response:

Review Report

„You have indicated that this is purposely designed as a broad study with the main purpose being "... to review the intersection field of risk governance and sustainability, and figure out the features of this research field and relationships of the two concepts." I accept this, however, there needs to be a significant contribution.

You have hinted at something like this in your response:

"Still, our reading work could continue for each research theme, for future detailed reviews of separate themes. Case studies and summary of methodologies need to be discussed in our next paper."

I see the necessity to articulate this in much more detail in your manuscript and thereby provide other researchers with the ability to build from your good work.“

Thank you very much for this comment.

Author Response:

The discussion of contribution and recommendations are added mainly in Lines 948-976. Firstly, our quantitative study shows the increasing interest in the risk governance and sustainability research, with the interdisciplinary feature. Secondly, the relationships between risk governance and sustainability are talked about. Thirdly, based on our analysis, the linkage between risk governance and sustainability deserves more attention, especially when confronting the interconnected global challenges. The article visualized the latent semantic structure in the line of risk governance and sustainability research, which is not noticeable due to the fragmentedly specialized literatures. It enables exchange of experi-ences and expertise in a larger scope. Innovative solutions to sustainability and risk mitigation can be more easily initiated from such a systematic perspective.

For hints of future work, to be honest, it is quite difficult for us. As the risk governance and sustainability involve both the theoretical research in too many fields and practices in the real world, we totally agree it should „offer substantive information that can be used to guide further research, public policy, business decisions or industry governance processes“ as the reviewer said. Due to our limitations, we are still finding clearer clues and hopefully propose more detailed mechanism suggestions based on case studies in our next paper.

For the improvement of this paper, after we reviewing those work of identified key themes related to the risk governance and sustainability research, the entry point of our recommendations goes from the private sector research/practices incorporating sustainability, the CSR role in SDG partnerships and then goes to demanding future research in policy integration, the importance of the transformation and co-evolutionary research. We admit that our suggestion is incomprehensive and did not go into details (A paper with case studies could help clarify the detailed pulls and pushes from the process perspective). But we have tried to provide a clear-cut way to sustainability that the risk research community could play an important role than ever, both in theory and in practice. In particular, the risk governance framework can provide a bridge for mutual learning and understanding across disciplines and boundaries towards sustainability-related objectives.

Again, thank you very much for all your work and looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Yours sincerely,

Huijie Li & Jie Li

Author Response File: Author Response.docx