A Systematic Literature Review on ESG during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Recently, the trend towards social development, environmental friendliness and responsible corporate governance has spread to the field of investment, in connection with which the concept of ESG has arisen, the problems and prospects of introducing which into the activities of companies in various sectors of industry are devoted to an increasing number of works. It is especially important to follow the principles of ESG during crisis situations, which include COVID-19, and therefore the relevance of the study is beyond doubt.

In the review, the authors analyzed the most relevant articles to examine the combination of ESG and COVID-19 outbreak, in order to understand what the academics discovered.

The work fit the journal scope, the authors approach is interesting, have good structure and logic, but there are some issues that have to be improved

Comments:

1. It seems to me that title of the article should be changed

2. It will be better to reformulate research question 1 (line 65-66) in order to underline that period is considered not for only ESG, but in connection with COVID-19

3. I think that discussion section should be improved, it is more like the results of the analysis of selected articles and authors suggestions. In the discussion section it is necessary to present the authors results obtained, and how they differ from previously existing ones.

4. The author set research question for the study, but no conclusions were presented on answering this question. The conclusion is too long and oriented on identifying the main focus of the selected articles and the topics that they reveal

Author Response

See the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors and editor

 

I can see some aspects of the paper but it has a number of concerns.

 

The language of the article is not clear and hard to understand, for example “Moreover, even if the COVID-19 outbreak is recent, a lot of academics decided to analyze the effects of the pandemic on ESG making it difficult to systematize the current knowledge with the risk that the discussion will become stale.” Is very difficult to understand. 

 

Moreover, the author made claims without proper basis starting from the introduction. 

 

The contribution of the study is not clear.

 

The methodology is not justified. I suggest authors should read some recent articles about the SLR, meta-analysis, and content analysis.

 

It is hard to follow the discussion sections. Authors should divide it into subparts.

Author Response

see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for your contribution. I hope my comments add value to your paper. 

The paper explores an interesting topic – that is the relation between ESG and Covid-19 from a literature point pf view.

The introduction section motivates the paper well but should better highlights the gap in knowledge addressed in the paper. The literature review, which draws on a number of streams of literature, is quite comprehensive and positions the study well. 

The paper demonstrates an adequate understanding of the relevant literature in the field and cite an appropriate range of literature sources.

The method employed is appropriate and correctly explained.

The paper has clearly presented the results and analyzed them based on its merits and appropriateness. Further, the conclusions have expressed the essential features of research succinctly. 

Having said that, I suggest adding practical implications for practice at the end of the paper. This is particularly relevant if we consider the declared relevance of the topic for companies in the last years.

Author Response

see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for incorporating suggested changes.