New Paradigm of Sustainable Urban Mobility: Electric and Autonomous Vehicles—A Review and Bibliometric Analysis

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Please see the attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Please see the attachment. According to your comments, the authors have modified the paper. 

Kind regards

Authors 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

“New paradigm of sustainable urban mobility: electric and autonomous vehicles - a review and bibliometric analysis” focuses on the previous studies that analyzed the issues regarding the role that electric and autonomous vehicles can have in the transition to more sustainable cities, presenting a “picture” of what has been done until now (by who and where) and the gaps of the existing research. The paper is well-designed and looks good from a technical point of view. It addresses relatively new and interesting issues and fulfils the objective that has been proposed. In general, I liked it but there are some issues the authors need to focus upon. Below are some of my comments and suggestions:

1. The Abstract is too long. In my view, it can be more concise, both in the introduction to the topic and in the presentation of results/conclusions.

2. There are some dubious affirmations that need to be addressed, for example in the paragraph where the authors state that “If we look at the countries from which the authors come, it is evident that the most productive authors come from the countries of the European Union, namely Germany and Greece. This is in line with the productivity of the institutions shown in Table 2.”, but in Table 2 we see that the most productive institutions are from South Korea and USA.

3. In Table 2, the authors present the Seoul National University, from South Korea, as the most productive institution (with 14 articles). Still, in the text (line 315/316), they write “The institution with the largest number of papers is " Seoul National University " from Australia with a total of 14 papers”, which seems to be an error.

4. Regarding Figure 3, I must say that for me it was not easy to interpret and understand, maybe due to the size. I think that authors should address this issue given the importance of the information present in this same Figure.

5. Moving on to the Discussion section, there are several statements that need to be supported with references, for example in lines 568/569/570, where the authors state that “It should also be emphazised that the use of autonomous electric vehicles, despite the risk of loss of control, has a positive impact on reducing the total number of traffic accidents, which affects safety as well as reduces the economic consequences caused by traffic accidents”. The references in the Discussion end in line 336.

6. Still in the Discussion, it seems that there is a typo in Table 7, it is written “Description 2” but there is no “Description 1” in the paper.

7. Authors state (line 637) that "one of the limitations of research is the focus on scientific papers without considering books and book chapters", but in Section 3 (line 265) it is stressed that "In this bibliometric review are included only scientific papers while books and chapters in books were excluded". It feels like a contradiction, the authors choose to exclude books and chapters and then they feel it is a limitation. The authors should clarify this issue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Please see the attachment. According to your comments, the authors have modified the paper. 

Kind regards

Authors 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Such a review would be very interesting. However, in spite of the large number of literature sources, there are strong limitations, certain of which are mentioned below.

Writing a review is a really demanding task. Someone would read a review in order to have a comprehensive idea of a subject, to be informed of the current state of knowledge, of gaps in existing research work etc. For this reason, the most relevant and recent publications must be included in such a paper, with the main findings being highlighted.

Many recent and absolutely relevant publications have been excluded from the analysis. This way, significant information is lost, while the authors refer to “research gaps” already addressed in articles they have excluded from the analysis, despite the fact that they are indexed in Scopus and WoS (the databases they have used for their sources selection, as mentioned in line 213). This is obviously due to the criteria used for the selection of the sources, as given in lines 220-223.

Important aspects related with autonomous electric vehicles are missing in the review.

Moreover, even issues addressed in publications included in the reference list of the review, are mentioned as “research gaps”, so a more careful study of these publications could help.

As for the “research gap” related to SARS Cov-2 (lines 403-410), in terms of sharing autonomous electric vehicles, obviously safety issues related with social distancing do not apply only to autonomous electric vehicles; it is related with car-sharing, car-pooling, use of public transport etc. in general.

Although environmental issues are of extremely high importance, sustainability (and sustainable mobility) is characterized by three pillars: environment, society and economy, and not just the environment.

The data included in Tables of Section 4 are in question (a more careful survey could help), while Table 3 obviously contains wrong numbers (apparently “copy-paste” from Table 2).

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

thanks for submitting your manuscript. I appreciate the effort you have done to produce such a paper, especially the extensive literature review you have performed. Some of the major shortcoming are:

1) First of all, the paper needs an extensive editing of English language and style. That will improve the overal readability of the paper.

2) I strongly advise you to focus only on one specific topic rather than on three very broad topics like urban mobility, EVs and autonomous vehicles. Especially the first one (urban mobility) is too broad for the purpose of the paper.

3) Your research questions are too broad for a single scientific paper. Generally speaking, you try to address too many issues in one single paper

4) It's not very clear what kind of methodology you have used. Are you doing just a review of the literature or are you analysing the selected paper in a specific way?  This is not clear from section 3

Concluding, try to focus on one subject only and be very clear what kind of literature review you intend to perform and why this would have an added value for the field.

Good luck!

Reviewer 3 Report

The current paper reviews the literature associated with sustainable urban mobility with a focus on autonomous electric vehicles. The paper is well-written, discussing an interesting topic which can be a useful reference to practitioners due to the valuable literature review. However, some areas are not well described, and some issues need to be addressed by authors:

1- WOS should be defined at first place. 

2- It seems that more refences regarding the emission effects of vehicles on health could be added to the introduction section as follows:

·       Wei, H.; Wang, X.; Yao, Z.; Liu, H.; Liang, S.; Yang, Y.J. Framework for integrating traffic-source emission estimates into sustainability analysis. In Proceedings of the CICTP 2012: Multimodal Transportation Systems-Convenient, Safe, Cost-Effective, Efficient-Proceedings of the 12th COTA International Conference of Transportation Professionals, 2012. 

·       Baghestani, A.; Tayarani, M.; Allahviranloo, M.; Gao, H.O. Cordon Pricing, Daily Activity Pattern, and Exposure to Traffic-Related Air Pollution: A Case Study of New York City. Atmosphere, 2021, 12, 1458. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/atmos12111458

3- It`s better to use center align for text in Figure 1.

4- The classification of papers based on their subject, method, and research should be clearly stated (Page 10) as well as presenting them through tables, figures. I strongly recommend authors to mostly focus on methods and concepts rather than name, title, and citation of papers. For instance, the comparison of goals and methods among papers could be presented in tables.