The Relationship of Corporate Social Responsibility with Business Performance—A Bibliometric Literature Review
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe paper provides a bibliometric analysis and a review on the topic of CSR in the context of business performance.
First, I think that the abstracts should be slightly improved by adding information related to the results of the study- e.g. the leading country/university/author in this field, the average growth of the published papers in the analyzed period, etc.
Second, as the author have used certain choices for extracting the dataset, I think hat their choices should be further argues by providing evidence form the scientific literature - e.g. the choice for the Scopus database rather than other databases such as WoS (e.g. Sandu et al. 2024 discuss the fact that WoS provides a higher coverage than Scopus in terms of included papers)., the choice for the English written papers, the choice for the VoS Viewer rather than Bibliometrix or other similar products.
Furthermore, 2024 should have been excluded from the analysis as mentioned in the text. With all these, as depicted in Figure 3 in the extracted dataset there is a paper published in the 2024. Thus, please eliminate the paper and regenerate all the figures.
Various analyses which are specific to bibliometric are not provided, such as the annual growth rate, the collaboration indexes, thematic maps, normalized total citations, factorial analysis, intra-country collaboration, inter-country collaboration, etc.
Please add the names of the authors next to references in Table 3.
Furthermore, please try to provide more insight on the results you have obtained and answer to the questions such as: why country X is the first in this domain? why author X is the leading figure? why university X is the one with the most significant scientific contribution? why journal X is the one preferred for this type of research?
Also, please provide a comparative analysis between the results of your study and others on similar topics - e.g. discuss if a particular country has been placed on top-3 countries in various studies and try to determine why this situation occurred.
Add limitations and discuss them in connection with other bibliometrics from the field.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsDear authors,
Your work deals with a relevant and interesting topic and your objectives are worth achieving. After reading your work, I felt lost in the contextualization of the bibliometric analysis into the topic and the implications and interpretations as well as the limitations of your study. Furthermore, I would like to see a more comprehensible structuring of the work in terms of methods and results. In general, I miss a clear thread running through the work and a helpful discussion that takes the reader further. I have major reservations about your work. I will explain them below.
(1) Abstract: It does not contain results and conclusions. The summary could be improved in this way.
(2) Introduction: This part is very short, about half a page. That's not enough contextualization of your work. I would like to read an extended version that gives more context to your analysis. You also refer to the problem of contradictory results regarding the impact of CSR on business performance and the causes of the problem, but it is not very conclusive how a bibliometric analysis is important compared to the background you mentioned.
And what about existing meta-analyses such as https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-021-00211-2?
We also do not receive any definition(s) of CSR and business performance. Is there even a definition of CSR? You introduce CSR as a kind of method or tool. It is rather unclear whether CSR is just what organizations do (comparable to the behavior and actions of individuals), or the driving force behind it (such as the company's attitude, self-image, etc.). And where is the instrument located in this picture? I would therefore like to read a clear positioning of what CSR is and how it is expressed. This concept needs more systematization and theory. Business performance is also a concept that needs to be explained.
Finally, the introduction ends with your three research questions, two of which seem to be answered with simple descriptive statistics; they are probably among the simplest questions that can be answered with bibliometric analyses. The third question about research gaps is formulated quite generally, and I do not have the impression that you provide an answer to this question in your paper.
It might be helpful - especially for readers who have no previous experience with bibliometric analyses - if you describe your method in the introduction and explain how this analysis can contribute to the field of research and how.
(3) Methods: I have the feeling that a reader is not well informed about your methods. What is your exact strategy for answering your questions? What about using generally accepted methods of providing information (e.g., PRISMA)? Is there any human coding anywhere? If so, what about intercoder reliability? With reference to the publication by Donthu et al. (2021; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.04.070), for example, your description seems quite rudimentary.
(4) Results: Your results are interwoven with explanations of the method. Please separate the different types of information. I think this exhausts the reader. The tables and pictures are not very "readable". The tables are often too big for one page and the visualizations too small to see details.
The figures are on the one hand very simple (e.g. Fig. 4, 5, 6), on the other hand not very readable (Fig. 1, 2, 8, 9, 10); some seem to contain information that is not intended (e.g. Fig. 3, year 2024) or information is missing (e.g. Fig. 7, some authors are not listed). There are better ways to provide valuable visualizations (see e.g. Donathu et al., 2021).
(5) Discussion: The discussion consists of three paragraphs that do not even cover one page. The first paragraph is about what you have done. The second paragraph mainly repeats your findings and does not go beyond them. The third paragraph is about the merits of your study.
I miss a helpful discussion that takes the reader a step further. You should inform the reader of implications and interpretations as well as the limitations of your study. I as a reader am not impressed with your work if I don't know what to do with your results. Please, tell the reader and argue for it.
I have a feeling that this could be a helpful article, but as it stands it is not. I apologize for my negatively biased criticism, but the aspects that triggered my concerns also mask the positive aspects of your article.
Best regards
Reviewer
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsI thank the authors for the revised version of the paper. With all these, the newly added text on conclusions only discuss with other words the ideas that are already presented in the paper.
Therefore, as in the previous round of review, I think that the authors should provide more insight on the results, namely why a particular university is place on the first place with respect to the studied domain; why the first author is the most prominent figure, and so on. When answering to these questions, please consider providing evidence even by other similar papers where the same university/author/country/ etc. has been place on the top-tier.
Please reconsider the type of article as a bibliometric is not a review paper.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsDear authors,
the abstract, introduction and discussion have been significantly improved and are now easy to understand. The introduction now gives a better context for the study. It has also become very clear what the research gaps are and that an answer to the third research question is provided. If the scope of the research questions is appropriate in the eyes of the editor, the methods and results are in line with this. Most visualizations and tables are better now, but some visualizations could be larger if the brand of the software used could be omitted or moved elsewhere. You made it very clear that the visualizations are created by using VOSviewer.
Best regards
Reviewer
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 3
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThank you for the revised version of the paper. I have no further comments.
