Bibliometric Review on Sustainable Finance

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

The manuscript “Bibliometric review on sustainable finance” presents a review on existing literature on a term or concept that is highly topical and relevant to research. This bibliographic review appears to be reasoned, with an acceptable methodological basis and conclusions that can be described as interesting.

Next, to structure the rest of my review, I will be guided by and follow the questions proposed in the guidelines for reviewing.

• Is the review clear, comprehensive and of relevance to the field? Is a gap in knowledge identified?

As I have already commented, I think the review is correct, interesting and clear. In the introduction there is a review of other similar reviews, and it clearly emphasizes the gap that this new study intends to fulfill. I believe that, in some way, the objective set by the authors is fulfilled, so it can be assumed that the manuscript is of relevance in the field.

• Was a similar review published recently and, if yes, is this current review still relevant and of interest to the scientific community?

To the best of my knowledge, and also based on the review by the authors of the manuscript, I am not aware of any similar study. As I said earlier, I believe this study fills in the gaps that may exist in the field.

• Are the cited references mostly recent publications (within the last 5 years) and relevant? Are any relevant citations omitted? Does it include an excessive number of self-citations?

The study includes recent literature. In fact, one of the criteria used by the authors to select the articles to be reviewed is their publication date. On the other hand, the field of sustainable finance is relatively recent, so most of the studies are up to date.

• Are the statements and conclusions drawn coherent and supported by the listed citations?

I consider that the results and conclusions, especially those related to content analysis (and not so much to bibliometric analysis, which I consider, in my personal opinion, not very useful), are interesting, and seem to be supported by the references provided. Some points are identified in which both the research and the rest of the agents involved must go deeper if the objective of developing sustainable finance is to be achieved.

• Are the figures/tables/images/schemes appropriate? Do they properly show the data? Are they easy to interpret and understand?

In my opinion, this is perhaps the point that most detracts from my assessment of the manuscript. I believe, again in my opinion, that all figures should be revised and homogenized in format. A figure should help the reader to interpret a piece of information. And I believe that in this manuscript this is not achieved.

Figures 2 and 3: numbers are placed over the bars. This makes difficult the reading. While Figure 2 presents a title on it, Figure 3 does not. This is not consistent.

Figure 4: again, numbers are placed over the bars. The number of documents is presented (hypothetically) on the figure. But due to the scale selected, it can be seen. If an information can’t be correctly represented on a figure, don’t use a figure.

Figures 5, 6 and 7: I am a regular user of the R language. I am sure there is some way to edit the figures to make them more attractive and understandable to the reader. Otherwise, I recommend the authors to design their own plots with ggplot package.

Table 1: I appreciate the authors' effort to make a table with multiple rankings, and I understand their difficulty. But the table is somewhat confusing. Perhaps it could be redesigned in a simpler way. I suggest considering the possibility of putting the ranking in parentheses in the corresponding column, along with the number of papers, citations and corresponding average citations.

Figure 8: ok, but homogenize it with the rest of figures in terms of title (or not), colors, fonts…

Figures 9, 10, 11 and 12: I'm sorry, but I can't understand anything. Although graphics of this style can be very communicative, they work well when you have few items to show. When the number is large, it happens, as in these cases, that the labels overlap, resulting in chaos, or that some of the labels are not displayed. I suggest, if possible, to limit the number of items to be displayed to the most important ones, spacing the labels more, so that they can be read correctly and without being, somehow, overwhelming.

 

Finally, regarding the language used, I believe it is correct and does not need to be revised. Additionally, I suggest that the authors review the format of the references in the article. I understand that this is a minor point, but if I understand correctly, according to the rules of the journal, “References must be numbered in order of appearance in the text (including table captions and figure legends) and listed individually at the end of the manuscript” (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/instructions#back).

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

Thanks for submitting the revised manuscript, I have read the revised one and my suggestions are as below:

·         Still there is room for improving the structure of the paper. More clarity needed on sections’ heading and subheadings to present the methodology, analysis, result and discussion of the paper.

·         Presentation of figures and tables needs further improvement, for instance, figure 13 is a screen shot needs to be reproduced.

·         Methodology needs to be further improved. For instance, the authors used VOSviewer, Bibliometrix R-package and Microsoft Excel. However, more explanation need to be added on what functions they used to perform BNA and BPA.

·         Need to be consistent with font size/type, and line spacing throughout the manuscript.

·         Be consistent in labelling the graphs, figures.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

Dear Authors.

Thank you very much for responding to my comments and taking some of them into consideration.
The manuscript has improved, although I still consider that the graphic quality of the figures can be much improved.
If you could make progress in this regard, I believe it would be of great benefit to you.

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 article presents a study on the state of the art of sustainable finance. Without arguing about the currency of the term (with which I can agree), the work done nevertheless raises many doubts in my mind about its suitability for publication.

From my perspective, it seems to be an exercise based solely and exclusively on the use of a set of bibliographic tools. The results of these tools are a set of graphs and tables shown in the manuscript, without analyzing their suitability about the results they show.

In general terms, I believe that (in my opinion) the manuscript lacks a structure of analysis that would allow useful and clear conclusions to be drawn.

On the other hand, the format of the manuscript presented is totally chaotic and heterogeneous, not complying with minimum requirements.

 

I add below some brief comments to improve some of the points of the manuscript, which (in my opinion) requires a thorough work of improvement.

·       Please consider developing a new figure describing the methodology. It could be a good aid for understanding.

·       Maybe it could be interesting to analyze how with the filtering of words used in the search, the number of available items changes. Also consider creating a figure or a table for this point.

·       Section 3 starts with a third level section: 3.1.1. I am not sure this is correct. At least, it results hard for the reader to understand.

·       In my opinion, it is quite recommendable and helps during the read, to have all the figures with the same “format”: type (bars or columns, but use always the same), fonts, size, color (white or black background, but use always the same), etc. Please, consider to re-design all figures with homogeneity.

·       The figures need to be explained better. Not the results, but what is showed and why the figure is representative to explain the analysis done. I.E. what does Figure 4 represents?

·       Are Tables 1, 2 and 3 really necessary? Most of the journals are the same. Maybe these tables could be integrated into one, and add some columns showing the rankings.

·       Line 42-44. Reference for this.

·       Line 166. Definition of “average citation score”.

·       Figure 3. The categories can’t be read completely.

·       Line 198. Definition of “Bradford’s law”.

·       Figures 8, 9, 10, 11. Although could be interesting a figure like this, nothing can be read or understand. Maybe a short number of terms could be shown.

Please review the format of the paper to ensure that it conforms to the journal's publication guidelines. Font size and type, format of references...

Finally, please, I suggest a thorough review of the spelling and language used. I believe I have detected several typos, sentences that can be difficult to understand, as well as misused verb forms. (lines 118, 119, 124, 197.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper uses bibliometric method with content analysis process to investigate the trend of sustainable finance. I have read the complete paper and I hold the following observation on it.

• The paper is well written. Although proofreading could be further improved.
• Perhaps the paper needs to be restructured, e.g, section 2 is methodology but the sections 3 and 4 are part of the methodology as well?! More clarity needed on sections’ heading and subheadings to present the methodology, analysis, result and discussion of the paper.
• Perhaps more explanation or review of the existing literature could be added to highlight the gap and contribution of the study.

•  Methodology needs to be further improved. For instance, the authors used VOSviewer, Bibliometrix R-package and Microsoft Excel. However, more explanation need to be added on what functions they used to perform BNA and BPA. Hence, more explanation on the chosen statistical method and the logic behind the method selection is needed.
• It would be important to see some robustness/sensitivity checks beyond what the authors have done. Has any robustness check been done to confirm the validity of their findings?

I wish you the best of luck.