Love Thy Neighbour: Social Benefits and Port-City Relationships

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper needs to conduct further improvement. The comments are as follows:

1. Please provide a paper structure in the introduction section.
2. In section 1, I have seen that authors tired to compare some ports background or context. However, the research study needs to focus on 26 countries. The authors may need to compare the ports in 26 countries or 3 main regions including Asia, Europe, and North America.
3. For the research method, the authors need to mention that how to develop the research questions, target survey respondents selection criteria, research design including data collection period and ethical consideration. Any pilot test?
4. For the discussion, it needs to provide a literature review support. 
5. For the conclusion, it needs to provide a research limitation and future research direction. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment. Thank you very much for your time and consideration when reviewing this paper. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript on ‘ Love Thy Neighbour: Social Benefits and Port-City Relationships’ discusses a very important and interesting matter of relations between ports and local communities. The rationale for taking up the study is clearly explained, and so is most of the research method. The findings are well presented, and make a good basis for most of the conclusions.

The manuscript has, however, some elements that need to be either improved or amended. These are:

1. The Introduction explains what is missing in the literature but does not explain the contribution of the study to the science. It should be clearly stated.
2. Either research questions or hypotheses should be added.
3. Line 242 reads: ‘rate your level of agreement with the following statements’, and next there is a mix of 2 statements (lines 243-244) and 4 questions (lines 245-249) which is: (i) inconsistent, (ii) not correct, as a question beginning with ‘Do you feel…?’ causes one of the two possible answers (i) Yes, I do, (ii) No, I do not. So, I suggest skipping the ‘Do you feel’ part, leaving a clear statement, e.g. ‘The local population are aware of the benefits the port provides.’, which will be better for applying ‘agree/disagree’ Likert scale.
4. There should not be question marks in Lines 243-244, as these are statements, not questions.
5. Asking the respondents, the ‘ports’, whether they agree with the statement that ‘It is important for the local population to be knowledgeable about the port?’(line 243) seems to be misaddressed. How can ports know what is and what is not important for the local population? Only a survey of the local population can provide a reliable answer/ opinion on what is important to them. Consequently, how can ports agree or disagree with this statement? However, if ports have some good sources of information on this matter, it should be clearly put. So, either this part alone or this and other parts of the manuscript referring to this statement should definitely be corrected or removed if a good rationale/explanation cannot be provided.
6. The manuscript is quite well contextualized with respect to previous and present theoretical background in section 1.1, but it needs to be better contextualised with respect to previous and present empirical research (if applicable) in discussion part. The discussion section actually lacks discussion (!). In its present form it is rather a summary of findings, while it should compare or contrast obtained results with findings from other research. To help the Authors achieve it, I suggest that the discussion may include: (i) a brief (repeated) statement on the main aim of the manuscript, (ii) comparison of the most important findings of the study with those presented in the literature, showing whether they confirm or negate the existing opinions. If any differences are found, discuss the possible reasons. In this section you can also discuss/ highlight how your findings extend results of previous studies or if there were no such studies before, discuss what gap your study is filling and how the results contribute to scholarship.
7. The conclusion section includes some indications of recommendations. This is a good basis to elaborate recommendations and highlight it in the title of the section as ‘Conclusions and Recommendations’. The recommendations can also make a separate section.

Author Response

Please see the attachment. Thank you very much for your time and consideration when reviewing this paper. I have tried my best to address all of your comments and found them to be very helpful. Due to a lack of existing research on these topics it was hard to add more literature to the discussion to compare the findings with, however I have tried to highlight this lack of research and the contribution this paper makes more clearly. The changes are explained more clearly in the attached document

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The revised version is now ready for publication. 

Reviewer 2 Report

I recommend this manuscipt to be published. Good luck with citations!