Developing and Testing a General Framework for Conducting Transdisciplinary Research

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The study is well designed and the research procedures are explained in detail. The methods fit well with the research questions and the overall objective of the study. Thus, I recommend to accept the manuscript for publication. However, there are some minor points that could be revised to improve the scientific soundness of the study and to make the paper more grounded in the relevant literature. Below are the detailed comments.

1) The title. The title is very general, but note that you are interested in sustainable built environment, not the whole pallette of possible uses of transdisciplinary research. Thus, I would recommend a revision of the title, to make it more strict and appealing to readers from the field of sustainable building solutions, who probably are your target group.

2) Introduction. In my opinion, the paper would benefit from references to earlier general literature reviews of the transdisciplinary research process for sustainability, not limited to the field of the built environment. See, for example, Brandt et al. (2013). You refer to some papers, but judging from the introduction alone, it seems that you open up a new field of study, which, of course, is not true, because your literature review features 40 relevant scientific papers.

3) Discussion. It would be very interesting to see comparisons with other frameworks and conceptual models of the transdisciplinary research process. See, for example, Lang et al. (2012) and/or Tejada et al. (2019). How does your model correspond to other frameworks that refer to similar areas of interest? The studies to which I refer involve surveys and interviews. It would be great to know whether the conclusions drawn in these papers support your design.

4) Editing issues. The manuscript is well edited. However, I suggest that you go through it and make sure the spelling is consistent. For example, you use both "problematisation" and "problematization" and, unfortunately, this can be easily spotted by the reader because this word appears in tables and a drawing.

References

Brandt, P., Ernst, A., Gralla, F., Luederitz, C., Lang, D. J., Newig, J., ... & Von Wehrden, H. (2013). A review of transdisciplinary research in sustainability science. Ecological economics, 92, 1-15.

Tejada, G., Cracco, M., Bouleau, C. R., Bolay, J. C., & Hostettler, S. (2019). Testing analytical frameworks in transdisciplinary research for sustainable development. Sustainability, 11(16), 4343.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your useful comments, which facilitated the improvement of the paper. Please see the attachment on how each comment has been addressed (page numbers and line numbers are as per the print view).

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper "Developing and testing a general framework for conducting transdisciplinary research" is a good topic and an appropriate method was used. To further enhance the work I would suggest the followings:

1. The paper "Developing and testing a general framework for conducting transdisciplinary research" is a continuation of the exploration of collaborations in multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research to identify ideas that could contribute to developing and testing a general framework for conducting TDR. This study presents a general framework for conducting TDR. It highlights its three phases: TDR initiation, TDR management, and transdisciplinary knowledge exchange. Each phase has three associated stages explained in detail in the subsequent sections.

2. The work is missing the specific research questions and the hypotheses. The authors have to include some information on the abstract part especially on the method and data used.

3. This topic is relevant in the field of study; however, the work does not clearly address a specific gap in the field. I would strongly suggest to the authors to highlight the literature gap and underline the importance of this study.

4. What specific improvements should the authors consider regarding the methodology? What further controls should be considered?

The research uses a questionnaire that was distributed via LinkedIn poll to discover prospective research participants from a list of nearly 5000 followers. The LinkedIn poll presented a brief definition of TDR as it brings together various disciplines to work jointly to create new conceptual, theoretical, methodological innovations moving beyond discipline-specific approaches to address a common problem. However, the employed questionnaire is not using a Likert scale approach – the questionnaire is using the following options: 1- Not important at all, 2- Somewhat important, 3- Important, 4- Very important, and missing the option of “neutral” that might give some important information on the category of people being neutral.

5. The conclusions are consistent with the evidence and arguments presented; however, they should be connected with the hypothesis raised at the beginning of the paper.  

6. The used references are appropriate, however, there are some missing references such as:

Arnold, M. (2020). Transdisciplinary research (transdisciplinarity). In Encyclopedia of creativity, invention, innovation and entrepreneurship (pp. 2332-2340). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Tejada, G., Cracco, M., Bouleau, C. R., Bolay, J. C., & Hostettler, S. (2019). Testing analytical frameworks in transdisciplinary research for sustainable development. Sustainability, 11(16), 4343.

7. The figures are not clear. I would suggest to redesign them and better present the interaction their components have with each other.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your useful comments, which facilitated the improvement of the paper. Please see the attachment on how each comment has been addressed (page numbers and line numbers are as per the print view).

Author Response File: Author Response.docx