Sustainability Indicators of Surface Public Transportation
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)
The article is of a review nature. It shows the state of research and main trends. However, the recommendations are far too superficial. Why write a scientific article if there are no recommendations? After all, these recommendations are quite obvious.
Author Response
Dear
Thank you very much for your comment, I attached the answers in the attached file.
Best regards
Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)
Title: The title of the paper clearly defines the subject of the paper.
Abstract: The abstract indicates the aim of the work, as well as the obtained results. The proposal is to add to the abstract the method on the basis of which the authors reached the above conclusions.
Introduction: The authors pointed out the importance of sustainability in transport, but did not define the goal of their research, the method that was applied in the work, as well as the key results. Also, they did not show the structure of the work by listing all the chapters.
Sustainable Transportation: The authors pointed out various aspects of sustainability in a detailed and clear way. However, the authors did not refer to the existence of similar literature review studies in this analyzed area. Also, the proposal is to move part of the first sub-chapter Overview from line 90 to 94 to the Introduction chapter. It would be interesting if the authors would define the total number of works related to which aspect of sustainability in defined cities (USA, China, India, etc.).
How did you define the article as belonging to sustainable transportation?
Why in Figure 1. there’s no data for all countries?
HOw many indexed databases did you use to analyze articles around the world? From which databases VOS Viewer use data?
Methodology: The authors gave a description of the applied software and its application. But, applying of VOS Viewer is not a methodology it is just a presentation of results from one database.
How did you determine that 53 are top-related papers? Can you show their impact citation number of downloads or IF of the journal they published? The sample of 53 is very low.
Does the VOS Viewer show in Figure 2 the number of articles on sustainable transport in the past two decades in the world ?
What is the point of showing the co-occurrence of keywords in Figure 3. What does this picture without data show to a researcher? How one researcher can use data from Figure 3.
Results and discussion: The authors presented the results of the conducted research with a discussion of them. The year 2022 is noted on line 241, while the period until 2023 is defined in the paper. In addition to the graphical representation of the results, the proposal is to define the y axis on all displayed graphs within the chapter.
Conclusions: In the conclusion of the paper, the authors gave a brief overview of the objective of the subject research as well as the key results, in terms of indicators, obtained in the research.
How do you see the connection between the result of this paper and an evaluation of public transport?
Many conclusions are general without connection to paper results and the aim of the paper
Is this only and final result of the paper? “According to WoS, VOS, and our related paper investigation, the final indicators are summarized as follows “
This sentence needs to be moved to the next chapter “Also, the statics models and MCDM tools are the main useful methods for the researchers to evaluate the dimensions of sustainability.”
Recommendations and future works: The authors of the paper did not specify what future works on this topic could deal with, as well as whether there are certain limitations. The authors did not emphasize what is shown in Table 2. Table 2 does not belong to this chapter. BTW there’s no Table 1 in the paper.
Author Response
Dear
Thank you very much for your comment, I attached the answers in the attached file.
Best regards
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)
The manuscript is well written. The methods are very novel. But needs a minor editing, to increase/ensure the maximum quality.
Main Suggestions
* Need to improve the abstract language. The first sentence used the word "are" two times. Not a good attraction at the start of the manuscript.
* English level is not perfect in the abstract, for example, 1- Emissions, pollution, 2- travel time, 4- Traffic Flow, speed why few numbers have a capital letter, and others have small, etc.
* Keywords: need to add about the methods, for example, systematic review
* Line 37, Line 40: The first two citations are repeated. At the start of the introduction, this may put a bad impression. Please put some effort, into it and check the manuscript (throughout). same as in Lines 54, 56. why need to repeat the citations again and again? This is a publication, that needs a better impression. Need to edit.
* After the introduction section, 2. Sustainable Transportation: this is not a better flow or a proper section, needs to give a proper heading.
* Part 3 can add the steps of the method, in a proper diagram, this will improve the manuscript. your methods have the best level, but if the presentations in the manuscript improve, this will be a better try.
* Figures 1,2 and 6 quality is a little bit not clear, please save and use the maximum pixel etc.
1. Figure 6. Distributions of indicators. Need a clear image. The quality of clearance needs to increase.
2. Figure 5. Types and Frequency of Sustainable Indicators. Social indicators need the capital letter of social. Same as other indicators.
3. Figure 4. No. Of investigated articles over the years. Empty space around the figure, can be reduced.
| 4. Figure 1. Distributions of publications from WoS with country region. This also needs the clear names of the countries. |
Overall manuscript is the great, and congrats for the better work, but these suggestions need to be made. For the maximum and better quality.
The paper is well organized, and the methods have the novelty. This might be one of the good papers in this journal. I recommend that authors get professional editing to rank this paper in the editor's choice top-ranked papers.
Author Response
Dear
Thank you very much for your comment, I attached the answers in the attached file.
Best regards
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)
I have no additional comments.
Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)
I appreciate the new efforts to improve the quality of the manuscript. A better work, and congratulations to all the co-authors' team.
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
The research is interesting. It shows the complexity of the discussion on sustainable transport.
Critical remarks:
1. Conclusions are too general (Table 2 should not be here, it should be presented in the research results).
2. There is no evaluation of the examined articles in terms of indications for further research (discussion).
Reviewer 2 Report
Title: The title of the paper clearly defines the subject of the paper.
Abstract: The abstract clearly indicates the goal and the obtained conclusions of the research, however, the authors did not specify the method by which they reached the stated conclusions.
Introduction: The authors clearly indicate the importance of sustainable development of the transport system. However, the authors did not indicate the existence of a similar study that dealt with the same literature review, nor did they indicate the structure of the work at the end of this chapter.
Sustainable Transportation: The authors have clearly and comprehensively defined sustainable transportation as well as its importance.
Methodology: The authors did not clearly define the applied methods for the analysis of sustainable transport works. Applying VOS Viewer is not methodology. Sample of 53 papers is extremely low for statistical analysis. Low sample cannot produce reliable results for discussion and for conclusions. It is not clear how did the authors selected this 53 papers. Basically only descriptive statistic is applied there’s no analytic static in this paper. methodology part is very scarce.
Result: Given that the authors, when presenting the results, also carried out their analysis, the proposal is to define the Results chapter as Results and Discussions. Also, it is necessary to define the x and y-axes of the graph in Figure 1, as well as source of figure and tables. Many figures have low resolution. In addition to the above, it would be interesting to mention which countries have studied the area of sustainable transport the most. When comparing indicators of sustainable transport, it is necessary to define the y-axis in Figure 3. The same applies to Figure Types and Frequency of sustainable indicators. Also, it was noticed that the authors defined Figure 5 twice, but Figure 4 does not exist. Due to lack in sample size and methodology applied here limitation is that results of this paper are nor reliable.
Conclusions: In the conclusion of the paper, the authors gave a brief overview of the goal and key results of the subject research. Also, it would be interesting to compare the findings with other studies that have dealt with the same topic. Due to lack in sample size and methodology applied here limitation is that conclusions of this paper are nor reliable.
Reviewer 3 Report
The article belongs to a review article.The purpose of the article is to determine the highest indicator that affects the sustainable development of public transportation. This article uses statistical methods and keyword co-occurrence methods to analyze a total of 1191 articles related to sustainable public transportation in the WOS database from 2000 to 2023. Through statistical methods, it was found that the number of relevant articles showed an upward trend in the next 10 years. Keyword co-occurrence methods were used to identify keywords that are strongly related to "sustainability" and "public transportation". The article also classifies transportation sustainability indicators (social indicators, economic indicators, environmental indicators, technical indicators), and based on this, statistically analyzes the frequency of various sustainability indicators within the corresponding categories within the scope of popular articles.
The current version of the article is in the form of an article, but the description of the research content is more like a report, lacking one's own explanation of the research conclusions. It is recommended to reject the manuscript for revision.
The main purpose of this study is to select the most representative indicators for studying the sustainability of public transportation. The frequency of public transportation sustainability indicators should not be solely determined by the frequency of the indicators, but should be comprehensively evaluated based on the reasons why the author chose a certain type of indicator as a public transportation sustainability indicator and the limitations of certain indicators in the reference literature.
Figures are blurry （Figure1、Figure2、Figure 5(line 201) ) and Captions are Repetitive(line 199 and line 201). Figure 1 shows the historical trend of the number of related articles, with the horizontal axis in ascending rather than descending order.
