Role of Traditional Ethnobotanical Knowledge and Indigenous Communities in Achieving Sustainable Development Goals
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
- First, the work does not follow the format set out in the magazine I recommend that you review the Template.
- The title describes the content, I think it's correct.
- In the abstract, the objective of the work is not reflected, let alone the results and conclusions obtained.
- The same goes for the article in general. Although it is a bibliographic review, it should be clearly established: Objectives, Methodology, Results, Discussion and Conclusions. In this case it gives the feeling of reading a long introduction.
- In addition, there are basic errors such as the arrangement of figures in the text. All figures are quoted in the text but are added on pages in no apparent order:
- Figure 1 is included on page 4 but is quoted on page 6 and this is not correct. The quote must appear before the figure. The figure foot is very long, it should be limited to referencing what it is.
- Figure 2 is not required, as all the information it contains appears in the text.
- Figure 3 makes no sense on page 9 as it relates to the content of the introduction.
- Other mistakes recommendations are:
- Skip “Sentence summary”.
- Line 7 of the abstract lacks a “.” previous to “Of the seventeen goals…”
- In Line 8 of the Introduction there are “..” after “civil society”.
- Divide Figure 1a,b into two independent figures.
- On line 21 on page 5, change “In the present review article, We have…” by “In the present review article, we have…”.
- On page 6, where is “the issues related to diet related malnutrition…” should be “the issues related to diet, related malnutrition…”.
- Page 13, in the last 7 lines, replace symbols “[]” to “()”. Same on lines 2 and 3 on page 14.
- Review bibliographic citations, they should go in the format of In addition, if the author is quoted in the text, it should not be indicated in the year of publication. For example, on page 16, line 16, appears “Peters, Alexiades, and Laird (2012)”, remove (2012) and add citation.
- On page 17, in the Conclusions section where is “whether it can be recommended as a source of nutrition or not and if yes” should be “whether it can be recommended as a source of nutrition or not? and if yes”.
- In Conclusions, no quotations should appear. If the conclusion of the work is another author's conclusion, the innovation provided is questionable.
Author Response
Dear Prof.,
Thank you for taking time in reviewing our paper. We have analysed all the comments and incorporated all your suggestions. This has greatly improved the paper. We thank you for your valuable time. Here, I have attached specific responses to the comments/queries raised.
Thanking you
Sincerely Yours
Dr. Ajay Kumar
Corresponding Author
Reviewer 2 Report
I reviewed the article entitled: “Role of traditional ethnobotanical knowledge and indigenous communities in achieving Sustainable Development Goals” by Kumar and colleagues. This review paper has certainly some merits: most importantly to highlight the potential role of ethnobotany, a science that too often is erroneously considered as old-fashioned, to tackle some of the most important issues of our times, as represented by the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Nevertheless, several issues need to be solved before considering this paper for publication:
- A linguistic revision of the manuscript by a native speaker is needed. English language is below par.
- There is a lack of references in several parts of the manuscript.
- There are a few punctuation issues: e.g. capital letters after commas, semicolon instead of colon. Please revise carefully punctuation throughout the text.
- You mention at page 8 that wild food plants are cultivated, in this case won’t they stop to be WILD food plants? Are you referring to neglected crops? It would be good if you provide practical examples or case studies, in paragraph 2. to substantiate the claim that wild food plants can be important to diversify the food basket of different human populations, and the potential role of ethnobotany in this issue. There is plenty of such case studies in the literature, in several areas of the world.
- Figure 3: this important figure is poorly readable, please re-draw it to make it more accessible for readers. Readability of the figures is overall very poor.
- Paragraph 3: this paragraph starts with a very long (perhaps too much) introduction of the detrimental effects of pollution due to agricultural activities. I think that this part should be reduced. Also in this case, I believe that this paragraph would benefit from practical examples, extracted from international literature, on how ethnobotany could help tackling these issues.
- Paragraph 4: Some authors of the botanical scientific names are missing.
Author Response
Dear Prof.,
Thank you for taking time in reviewing our paper. We have analysed all the comments and incorporated all your suggestions. This has greatly improved the paper. We thank you for your valuable time. Here, I have attached specific responses to the comments/queries raised.
Thanking you
Sincerely Yours
Dr. Ajay Kumar
Corresponding Author
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The text has improved quite a bit, but it still does not meet the magazine's editing standards. I think this is mandatory. I recommend you review https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/instructions
I can't see the document with the specific answers, but I've found that they've followed almost all my recommendations. However there are still several things that need to be polished:
- The abstract should be a total of about 200 words máximum.
- Make sure that there are no vertical and horizontal pages.
- Delete Figure 1. The information provided in the text is really sufficient and so many figures in a row are not necessary.
- Figure 2 is very dense. They must make it more schematic. To do this, give more information about your hypothesis of how ethnobotany can contribute to the achievement of SDG's in the text and design the figure more as an infographic.
- Figure 3 appears before your appointment in the text, it should appear later. In the footer write only “The four dimensions for ensuring food security for all” followed by the FAO meeting.
For future revisions, use Word and Word track changes.
Author Response
Dear Prof.,
Thank you for taking time in reviewing our paper. We have analysed all the comments and incorporated all your suggestions. This has greatly improved the paper. We thank you for your valuable time. Here, I have attached specific responses to the comments/queries raised in the word file.
Thanking you
Sincerely Yours
Dr. Ajay Kumar
Corresponding Author
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
I reviewed for the second time the manuscript entitled: “Role of Traditional Ethnobotanical Knowledge and Indigenous Communities in Achieving Sustainable Development Goals” by Kumar and colleagues. I feel that the paper have improved from the previous revision, but it still needs at least another round of moderate revisions before acceptance. On a general note, the presence of line numbers and the use of Word track changes would have greatly helped the reviewers to perform their task.
Here below my comments and suggestions:
-Please revise the authors‘ list, the third author is only “Komal”?
-First two lines of the abstract, please avoid the repetition of “envisage”
-The language of the abstract is still broken with bad use of punctuation e.g. abstract line 4, avoid beginning the sentence with “and” after a full stop; line 12 of the abstract, “understand it”. Understand what?
-Figure 2: Would it be possible to represent this figure in a more schematic way? That is, without all this text.
-2. Methodology, around line 5 of this section you say: “We have conducted an extensive literature survey of the available literature to find out the papers and the reports relating to traditional knowledge to link it with the sustainable development goals.” Perhaps you can add a table of the number of articles that relates to each different development goal or to each of the four broad areas that you identified. By the way, can you define these four areas in the Methodology? Overall, I think that a more quantitative approach can be important for this paper.
-Figure 3: Different font sizes were used in the figure, please make this more consistent.
-Page 17 last line: I do not understand this sentence, please rephrase
-Page 19: Please rephrase this whole sentence: ”The most popular herbal tea of Southern Ecuador…wild population”. It is a bit unclear to me.
Author Response
Dear Prof.,
Thank you for taking time in reviewing our paper. We have analysed all the comments and incorporated all your suggestions. This has greatly improved the paper. We thank you for your valuable time. Here, I have attached specific responses to the comments/queries raised in the word file.
Thanking you
Sincerely Yours
Dr. Ajay Kumar
Corresponding Author
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
