Sustainable Supply Chain Management: A Comprehensive Systematic Review of Industrial Practices
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors conduct a literature review and analyze the results to provide a big picture concerning sustainable practices. Different aspects, including the type of industry and the applied methodology, along with depicting a comprehensive categorization for the practices, are studied. I appreciate this work, and I think it would be a good contribution to the journal. I only have a small suggestion. That is, in line 773, the word “versus” should not be shortened to “vs” without warning.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper is interesting and valuable providing an elaborated systematic review of sustainability practices based on extensive literature review. I would suggest the followings improvements:
- to include in the title the systematic review;
- to explain the combination between the quantitative and qualitative methods applied at the beginning of the research methodology.
- The outcomes of the paper should be more elaborated such as definition of identified gaps leading at a research agenda.
- The impact of the paper on addressing sustainability in practice
- Presenting the limitations
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
This study shows the applications of sustainable practices based on the literature review and offers a comprehensive approach for future research. Overall, the study is interesting, but I have a few suggestions.
Abstract – Abstract needs to be revised because some readers do not know the triple bottom line of sustainability. Therefore, the author(s) needs to explain this concept. Also, the author(s) need to explain what does mean for a shortcoming from previous studies (see lines 6-7: “However, there is a shortcoming to suggest a comprehensive framework concerning various industries”). From lines 14-16, the author(s) need to provide novel interpretations of their findings. In addition, the author(s) mentioned “a new” classification. What exactly do they add to a new sustainable supply chain research approach? The author(s) should address this issue. If they just updated the study, there is any contribution. So please revise the abstract accordingly.
Introduction – line 34: how does industry change the processes? The author(s) should explain this.
Literature search – the author(s) used Scopus. Please justify that Scopus is a reliable source (of course, we all know this resource is reliable for research, but are there any references?)
Figure 4 – too many summarized keywords. Please clarify some keywords (e.g., CLSC, MCDM)
As for quality performance (3.6), it would be interesting to see what ISOs relate to specific industries.
Figure numbering should be revised – see line 675 – figure 8/line 703 – figure 8 again.
Figures 8 (Comparison between main categories of SSC practices) and 9 are hard to understand. The author(s) can remove or revise the figures.
Since I can find several errors, please review the paper thoroughly and check the errors (e.g., grammar, numbering).
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
First of all, I appreciate the opportunity to review your paper Sustainable supply chain management: A comprehensive review of industrial practices. There are numerous problems listed below:
- The review paper should not just be a list of what everyone has done but should identify trends and gaps in the literature and offer suggestions for furthering the field relative to the specific phenomenon, with a very strong critical view and very strong methodology.
- The abstract is not well written. The most important results must be listed.
- Keywords should include review, literature review, or SLR. Also, avoid duplication (Supply chain management, Sustainable supply chains, Sustainable...).
- The last paragraph in the introduction section is a short methodology/structure of the paper (several sentences for each section). This is missing.
- There is no SLR methodology. This kind of paper must have a very clear methodology (journals, keywords, databases). There are numerous papers for methodology (see Suggested References). The existing methodology is very modest.
- The research question should be better formulated (lines 89-92).
- It is necessary to understand the purpose and aim of the paper as well as its "position" in relation to previous research (also gap analysis).
- The separate section Practical and theoretical implications (or Discussion) is missing. The existing section Discussion is very modest. This confirms the lack of scientific and practical contribution.
- The paper is descriptive and analytic, not critical and exploratory.
- The paper lacks scientific research rigor, the research steps are not systematic and objective.
- The Discussion and future research section are very modest. The authors will have to demonstrate the impact and insights of the research. The authors need to clearly provide new future research directions (this confirms a bad relationship with the gaps in the literature).
- The conclusion section is not on a satisfactory level. Clearly state your unique research contributions in the conclusion section.
- The paper has no scientific and practical contributions.
The paper does not correspond to high standards of Sustainability.
Suggested References
Denyer, D. & Tranfield, D., (2009). Producing a systematic review. In D. Buchanan & A. Bryman (eds.) The sage handbook of organizational research methods. Sage Publications Inc., Thousand Oaks, CA, 671-689.
Tranfield, D., Denyer, D. & Smart, P., (2003). "Towards a methodology for developing evidence‐informed management knowledge by means of a systematic review", British Journal of Management, Vol. 14 No. 3, pp. 207-222.
Kilibarda, M., Andrejić, M., & Popović, V. (2020). Research in logistics service quality: a systematic literature review. Transport, 35 (2), 224-235.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
In my own review, I found several minor revisions that are needed and I invite you to revise your manuscript accordingly.
-Introduction – line 34: how does industry change the processes? The author(s) should explain this.
-Please review the paper thoroughly and check the grammar errors.
Author Response
Dear reviewer, thanks for your time.
Regarding your first comment, please note that the "industry" does not refer to a specific industry, and it is a general term. Moreover, in this research, we concentrated on the effect of sustainability on different industries and not the reverse. As you see, we have investigated how the traditional practices in various industries have been changed because of the effect of sustainability.
Concerning the language, it is double-checked.
Reviewer 4 Report
This paper still has major lacks from the previous round. The authors only gave the answers to the comments, but changes are not done (or partially done).
For example:
• Comment#1: The review paper should not just be a list of what everyone has done but should identify trends and gaps in the literature and offer suggestions for furthering the field relative to the specific phenomenon, with a very strong critical view and very strong methodology.
[Response]: Thanks for your comment. In the first version of the manuscript, we tried our best to do according to your comment, also in the revision we have used your comments and references to improve what we did.
NOT DONE
• Comment#5: There is no SLR methodology. This kind of paper must have a very clear methodology (journals, keywords, databases). There are numerous papers for methodology (see Suggested References). The existing methodology is very modest.
[Response]: Thanks for your comment. The comment is considered and we have used the instruction from the references to improve our review paper.
NOT DONE
• Comment#6: The research question should be better formulated (lines 89-92).
[Response]: Thanks for your comment. In those question we tried to give a prompt way to reader for finding out about what they can get from reading the paper.
NOT DONE
• Comment#8: The separate section Practical and theoretical implications (or Discussion) is missing. The existing section Discussion is very modest. This confirms the lack of scientific and practical contribution. The Discussion and future research section are very modest. The authors will have to demonstrate the impact and insights of the research. The authors need to clearly provide new future research directions (this confirms a bad relationship with the gaps in the literature).
[Response]: Thanks for your comment. Section 5 of our paper is named discussion and future research and in this section we tried our best to describe our findings with the statistics analysis and logical managerial viewpoint. On the other hand, we highlighted the future path for studying and working on this field for both of academicians and businesses.
• Comment#9: The paper is descriptive and analytic, not critical and exploratory.
[Response]: Thanks for your comment. Our main aim for writing this paper was to describe and analyze previous works. But, while we studied on this paper we highlighted the critical and hot issues of this subject and explored to depth of all details that we could face with in the sustainable practices.
NOT DONE
• Comment#10: The paper lacks scientific research rigor, the research steps are not systematic and objective.
[Response]: Thanks for your comment. We considered your comment, but as we said before those mentioned regards are the base principles of the paper and we truly tried hard to achieve them.
NOT DONE
Author Response
Dear reviewer, thanks for your time. We replied to the previous concern clearly as below. Please also consider the length of the paper, which is now about 14000 words. If you need more explanations, please refer to the specific section in the paper.
Response to Comment#1: This is the most recent research that shows a classification of sustainable practices as discussed in the third paragraph of the Introduction section. The gaps and future research are discussed in Table 2 in the discussion section, and the methodology is clearly stated in section 2, following a four-step process referring to the prestigious review papers in the literature (Tranfield et al., 2003; Denyer et al., 2009; Shekarian, 2020; Shekarian & Flapper, 2021).
Response to Comment#5: The research methodology of the paper has clearly stated in section 2. We carried out a systematic literature review based on a four-stage procedure. First, a comprehensive database was considered to select the previous studies. The next step included presenting the descriptive analysis. Then, to investigate the mentioned questions, a comprehensive framework was presented. The extracted materials were evaluated at the final stage. This methodology is used in similar studies related to the sustainability and supply chain literature (Tranfield et al., 2003; Denyer et al., 2009; Shekarian, 2020; Shekarian & Flapper, 2021). The keywords and databases are completely explained in section 2.1. Moreover, the investigated journals are discussed in section 2.2.
Response to Comment#6: The first question of the research is about the classification of sustainable supply chain practices (How can we classify the SSC practices extracted from different industries to show a big picture?), which is replied according to extracting 789 practices and illustrated in Fig. 5; The second question (How is the contribution of different industries to grow SSCs?) and third questions (How is the procedure of collection and analysis of sustainable practices?) are replied in section 4, especially see Figs. 10 and 11, respectively.
Response to Comment#8: Results section of the paper shows the practical implication of the research. Specifically, in Fig. 7 and 8, we explained different sustainable practices that can improve the performance of the process in different industries. In Fig. 11, the applicability of different methods is discussed. Please note this is not a theoretical paper and is a review paper to classify the practices. In Table 2 of section 5, we showed the gaps and potential for future research concerning the connection between sustainability and a range of industries and future research accordingly. The reviewer can refer to paragraphs 5, 6, and 7 in the discussion section.
Response to Comment#9: You are right. The paper is descriptive to derive a big picture and show the road map of sustainability and industries. In contrast to usual research that targets a specific industry, the paper does not focus on a specific industry and is analytical. As you can see, the concern of the research is to classify sustainable practices. This is a unique paper that is conducted for the first time in the literature.
Response to Comment#10: The paper's objective is completely clear, as mentioned in the research questions and the research methodology section. Especially Table 1 is comprehensive and unique regarding the arrangement and scop.
