Logistics Trends and Innovations in Response to COVID-19 Pandemic: An Analysis Using Text Mining
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you for the opportunity to review this interesting article. It is well-written and contains important analysis on the recent advances in logistics and supply chain management.
There are, however, a few shortcomings where the article can be improved:
1. Figure 1: What is the value this figure brings? Is it copied from the source given? Is the x-axis (year) related to the figure? E.g., digitalization in supply chain research did not emerge in CA 2012, it is much older topic.
2. What are the justifications for your choices in methodology? Why is the time period chosen as 2016 - 2021? Why are there 5098 chosen articles? Please elaborate.
3. Conclusions: What is the evidence that SMEs must perform maturity scan for digital readiness? How does this link to competitiveness and being future proof? These are vague and baseless claims. Please use references and think once more whether or not these claims hold water.
If the mentioned points are addressed by the authors, I shall recommend the article to be published.
Author Response
Reviewer 1:
Thank you for the opportunity to review this interesting article. It is well-written and contains important analysis on the recent advances in logistics and supply chain management.
Thank you.
There are, however, a few shortcomings where the article can be improved:
- Figure 1: What is the value this figure brings? Is it copied from the source given? Is the x-axis (year) related to the figure? E.g., digitalization in supply chain research did not emerge in CA 2012, it is much older topic.
We added Figure 1 to make the general framework of this study clear to readers. The framework incorporates the concepts of resiliency, sustainability, and digitalization. To make the use of this framework more explicit, we put some additional explanation in lines 124-127. We mentioned that “This paper uses the concepts of resiliency, sustainability, and digitalization found in Figure 1, to analyze the trends and innovations in logistics before and after the onset of COVID-19 pandemic.” Figure 1 is originally made by us and is an improved version from the study of Ivanov (2020).
Reviewer 1 is correct that digitalization in supply chain (logistics) is existing for decades, yet it only gained significant attention in research and wider adoption in industry in recent years via the themes such as Industry 4.0 and data analytics. We added the studies of (Herold, Ćwiklicki, et al. 2021) and (Stank et al. 2019) to support our statement. Please refer to lines 156-158 for the changes in the main text.
- What are the justifications for your choices in methodology? Why is the time period chosen as 2016 - 2021? Why are there 5098 chosen articles? Please elaborate.
We added a more elaborate explanation in our methodology on why we chose the time 2016-2021 in our study. We mentioned in lines 184-188 that: “To support our objective on understanding the impact of Covid-19 on the three logistics and supply chain themes (resiliency, sustainability, and digitalization), we divided articles in two periods: (1) 2016-2018 which represents the pre-Covid-19 period and (2) 2019-2021 representing the Covid-19 period up to the date of writing”. We did not include year 2022 since it is not completed during the writing of this paper and additionally, 2022 already represents the phasing out of the Covid-19 period.
The 5098 articles were not chosen but represent all available literature in logistics paper (journals with logistic(s) in their name) published between 2016-2021. The purpose of this analysis is to provide an unbiased overview of the impact of Covid-19 and changes in trends in the whole body of logistics literature. We extended our explanation in the methodology section to make this clearer. Please refer to lines 183-184.
- Conclusions: What is the evidence that SMEs must perform maturity scan for digital readiness? How does this link to competitiveness and being future proof? These are vague and baseless claims. Please use references and think once more whether or not these claims hold water.
Our analysis shows general trends in logistics for both big and small logistics firms. These claims come from practical experience and available literature. Based on the feedback, we extended the linkage to available literature that support these claims:
“Big firms can more rapidly adapt to digitalization while SMEs still find it challenging to completely adopt digitalization due to limitations on financial and human resources (Dallasega et al. 2019). This is exemplified by the six biggest global companies which all have digital technology at the heart of their business model (Stank et al. 2019). The need for SMEs to be digitally ready are two-folds. Firstly, SMEs are an important backbone of the economy. For instance, approximately 36% of employment in the European Union comes from the SME’s, therefore making them important for domestic economic growth. Secondly, many big firms are dependent on SMEs, and as such are also dependent on their adaptation of digitalization or they will be in danger of being outcompeted by companies that do have SMEs in their supply chain that adopted digitalization (Bokša, Šaroch, and Bokšová 2020). Therefore, digitalization of SMEs is important towards competitiveness and future proofing of the whole industry.”
If the mentioned points are addressed by the authors, I shall recommend the article to be published.
Reviewer 2 Report
The article is a traditional literature review. It seems too general and contributes little to science. The cognitive conclusions of the research are addressed to the researchers (next researchers). Practical conclusions are addressed to managers of small and medium-sized enterprises and policy makers. Thus, the audience for this article has not been clearly identified. The article would have been more valuable if the authors had deepened the research (as they announced). I encourage already in this study to find more correlations between the terms and the context of the logistics trends. Ideally, it would be possible to assess logistics trends by continent or country or, for example, in the urban logistics sector.
Author Response
Reviewer 2:
The article is a traditional literature review. It seems too general and contributes little to science. The cognitive conclusions of the research are addressed to the researchers (next researchers). Practical conclusions are addressed to managers of small and medium-sized enterprises and policy makers. Thus, the audience for this article has not been clearly identified. The article would have been more valuable if the authors had deepened the research (as they announced). I encourage already in this study to find more correlations between the terms and the context of the logistics trends. Ideally, it would be possible to assess logistics trends by continent or country or, for example, in the urban logistics sector.
Traditional literature review can provide an in-depth overview and insights in a limited body of literature, often conducted on a manual basis. The methodology that we use is not a traditional review but studies a much larger body of (thousands) literature without bias. Furthermore, we provide a quantitative analysis of keywords and trends over time, and we calculate their significance, and their correlation. This is something that cannot be achieved by reviewing papers manually, and instead can only be achieved through automated methods such as the one deployed by us. Therefore, we would argue the added value of this research is that to provide such an unbiased quantitative overview of keywords, trends and their significance while linking our results to available literature through traditional literature review. We made explicit of this contribution in lines 68-72 and the unbiased approached in lines 183-184 under methods.
Our results can be used for strategic decision makers, both by those inside sciences such as researchers and by those outside science such as SMEs and policy makers. We agree with the reviewer there is opportunity to gain in-depth insights, in the correlation analysis. We added a more in-depth analysis in the Discussion section where we now clearly link the findings from literature to the results from our correlation analysis. Refer to lines 328-335, 349-360.
Regarding the specific topics for future research, there are both fundamental as practical reasons why we made these decisions. For example, specifying research per country is technically challenging because abstracts are not linked to metadata that specifies and country. Making such an analysis is therefore very challenging, if possible, at all and kept as suggestion for future research (see lines 382-384). On a more fundamental level, the objective of this paper is to identify and quantify changes in trends in global logistics due to Covid-19 without bias. Therefore, our analysis is general and not applied to any specific sector. Based on the feedback of Reviewer 2 we extended the literature review and linkage to more specific sectors in the Discussion section (see lines 342-353) and we strengthened in the in the introduction the literature review and the gap this research addresses (see lines 65-72).
Reviewer 3 Report
Abstract
line 10: ......or even transform their business and underlying processes (removed the comma after transform)
line 12: over 5000 sounds jargon. How many did you review? Just be specific.
line 23: ........via e.g. the use of a maturity scan, (via, e.g., )
line 33: Many airlines companies
Line 71: over 5000 (be specific)
line 78: ...in the areas
line 80: airline companies (delete companies)
Line 156: was downloaded
Figure 2 should be made clearer.
Using a schematic diagram to present the methodology would make the section clearer.
Comparison between some of the early works discussed in the literature should be made with this study. In doing so, what is new would be identified. What is new in this work?
Author Response
Reviewer 3:
Abstract
line 10: ......or even transform their business and underlying processes (removed the comma after transform)
The comma after ‘transform’ is removed. See line 10.
line 12: over 5000 sounds jargon. How many did you review? Just be specific.
We changed over 5000 to 5098 articles. See line 12.
line 23: ........via e.g. the use of a maturity scan, (via, e.g., )
Done. See line 23.
line 33: Many airlines companies
Done, refer to line 33.
Line 71: over 5000 (be specific)
Edited. Please see changes in line 80.
line 78: ...in the areas
Done, see line 65.
line 80: airline companies (delete companies)
Done, see line 67.
Line 156: was downloaded
Corrected, see line 178.
Figure 2 should be made clearer.
We made a change in Figure 2 (now Figure 3). Instead of showing in one plot the relative word frequency for both pre-Covid 19 (2016-2018) and during Covid-19 pandemic (2019-2021) periods, we divided the plot into two parts corresponding to changes in relative word frequency for each period. Please refer to line 240 for the new figure.
Using a schematic diagram to present the methodology would make the section clearer.
We added a schematic diagram, including the corresponding explanation, as suggested by the reviewer. Please refer to lines 168-173 for the changes.
Comparison between some of the early works discussed in the literature should be made with this study. In doing so, what is new would be identified. What is new in this work?
We further added in our introduction what has been done and what is the gap in research that this paper is filling. We mentioned that “Literature studies show that the Covid-19 pandemic led to innovations in the areas of marketing, technologies, and collaborations (e.g. Galanakis et al. 2021; Markovic et al. 2021; Wang et al. 2020). Other studies have also explored the innovations brought by Covid-19 among logistics service providers and airline (Amankwah-Amoah 2021; Klein, Gutowska, and Gutowski 2022; Dovbischuk 2022; Herold, Nowicka, et al. 2021). Authors of these studies employed either qualitative or quantitative methods. Although there is research available that use text mining to analyze the impact of Covid-19 on businesses (Carracedo, Puertas, and Marti 2021) and on Covid-19 research in general (Zengul et al. 2021), to our knowledge there is no research published to date that specifically looks at the impact of Covid-19 on the logistics sector using text mining approach.”
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you for addressing my comments. I shall recommend the article for publication.
Reviewer 2 Report
The article has been corrected in accordance with the comments
