A Social Assessment Framework to Derive a Social Score for Green Material Selection: A Case Study from the Sri Lankan Cement Industry

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Congratulations on your paper. These are my suggestions for improvement:

1.      Introduction

The introduction of the paper should stand alone, so I recommend the authors provide an overview of the objectives, methods, and a brief description of the paper’s structure.

The proposal of this study is to introduce a social assessment framework. This objective should be clearly stated in the introduction section.

2.      Theoretical background

In this section, the authors explain the gap that is being addressed. This should be given more attention, as this justifies the paper’s construction. Why should one develop a distinct framework when there are several tools already widely employed and validated in the literature? It would be beneficial to address this question.

3.      Research methodology

The sentence in line 178 does not contribute to the paper. Please consider rephrasing or removing it.

The authors should clearly state in this section that it is a ranking problem that is being solved by the proposed framework.

The framework is the heart of this paper. The authors should provide the reader with a clear image regarding the process. In this sense, please consider replacing Figure 3 with a more process oriented “input – process-output” view.

4.      Results

The authors present a comprehensive analysis of their results, which will contribute to enrich their discussions and conclusions sections.

 

5.      Discussions

The authors present a robust comparison between their results and previous literature, providing insights into their results.

 

6.      Conclusions

The authors provide conclusions for several of the main topics which were raised in this paper. In line 572 the authors claim that “these findings provide valuable guidance…”. Are these results from your paper? If not, please consider rephrasing to “these findings could provide…”. This applies to all similar affirmations.

Another question is regarding the employment of the framework. Do you have evidence that it was employed by any of these professionals / academics that were interviewed? This could be stated in the conclusions section, whether these professionals aim to put the framework into practice, and what are their insights when it comes to its uses.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Please find the attachment.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors have improved the content of the manuscript.