Current Advancements of and Future Developments for Fourth Party Logistics in a Digital Future
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The content of the paper “Current Advancements and Future Developments of Fourth Party Logistics in a Digital Future” seems to be adequate for the purposes of the journal.
Title and abstract: Clear and adequate.
Introduction: Clear and adequate.
Literature review. The introduction and the literature review prepare the reader to understand the research part of the article. In my opinion the literature review can be extended to support to understand the complexity problems of 4PL solution. For these scopes you can refer to https://doi.org/10.3390/en11071833 and/or https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/5180156 if suitable.
Methods of research. The technical description is detailed, the scientific results are not clearly described.
Conclusions. Clear and detailed. Implications, limitations and future research directions are discussed.
Author Response
The content of the paper “Current Advancements and Future Developments of Fourth Party Logistics in a Digital Future” seems to be adequate for the purposes of the journal.Title and abstract: Clear and adequate.
Introduction: Clear and adequate.
Literature review. The introduction and the literature review prepare the reader to understand the research part of the article. In my opinion the literature review can be extended to support to understand the complexity problems of 4PL solution. For these scopes you can refer to https://doi.org/10.3390/en11071833 and/or https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/5180156 if suitable.
=> Your suggestions are welcome – however our concern is not to overload the paper with too many facets to we beg pardon not include at the moment.
Methods of research. The technical description is detailed, the scientific results are not clearly described.
=> Indeed, we expanded Section 3 accordingly to elaborate more on our results along all three research hypothesis formulated and tested by the structured online survey. This includes the introduction of a new Table 3 at l.342 and an Appendix attached at the end.
Conclusions. Clear and detailed. Implications, limitations and future research directions are discussed.
=> Thank you – accordingly we make only some minor copy editing.
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper deals with a very interesting topic concerning the future of the logistics service industry in an era of profound (disruptive) changes mainly driven by digitalisation. The study of current role and future developments in the field of 4PLs is then very important in this context. The paper is well written and organised. The methodological approach is appropriate mixing both quantitative evidences with more qualitative information. Nevertheless, the manuscript shows a number of areas of improvement (see the four point below) that the authors need to take care in order to achieve the necessary standard for publication in Logistics journal.
1) Literature review and conceptual framework - The authors introduce the conceptual framework on which the entire paper is based in section 1 of the paper. Such conceptual framework comprises the following four dimensions: 4PL solutions (i.e. services offered by 4PLPs), 4PL providers (i.e. market environment of 4PLPs) and 4PL customer benefits (i.e. benefits arising from using 4PL services along with its drawbacks) that have been summarised in fig. 1 (p.3). How these dimensions have been identified? Very little has been written in the paper about this and it is still an unclear aspect of the paper. I’m aware that this has been done through the heavily involvement of practitioners. On the other hand, I think that such dimensions should be identified on the basis of an extensive and comprehensive review of the extant literature that has been missed completely by the authors. This option should has a number of advantages, such as: the identification of research gaps, the identification of appropriate research questions/objectives of the study and the opportunity to better clarify which the contribution of the paper. My suggestion is also to carry out such literature review on a systematic basis.
2) Research design and methodology - I like the research design especially as it is based on the use of mixed method. The only suggestion I have here is to write explicitly the function and the contribution of each of the three components of the methodology to address the research problem and RQs (see point 1). In addition, I suggest to summarise the entire methodological approach in a figure in order to make the entire process clearer.
3) Results and conclusion - I appreciated the presentation of results discussing together literature evidences and information coming from both qualitative and quantitative analyses. However, if I understood well, two out of three hypotheses have been dismissed and not confirmed by the data you collected. In the concluding section, there is no reference at all to this result. What is the impact of unconfirmed hypotheses on the conclusions of the study? This should be something that the authors should explicitly incorporate in section n. 4.
4) English language - It needs to be improved along with the entire text of the manuscript.
Editorial and stylistic suggestions
- I suggest to position tables and figures immediately after that they have been cited all over the text.
- The text from row 94 until row 100 is a repetition of the same text from row 84 until row 90. Please delete one of them.
- Table 1 is confusing as there are six different hypotheses while in the text the authors referred to three hypotheses only. Please clarify this.
- Row 472 - I suggest to add the word “survey” after the word “questionnaire.”
- Row 556 - in the reference n. 8 the year of publication is wrong. It should be 2017 rather than 2007.
Author Response
1) Literature review and conceptual framework -[..]
=> To be honest, these dimensions were established merely as a ad hoc conceptual framework to cluster our questions in the semi-structured interviews in a logical way after an initial review of present literature dealing with 4PL issues in connection with the aim of our research as outlined, which was set already in the very beginning. (cf. l.52 ff in Section 1 and l.62 ff in Section 2).
2) Research design and methodology - [...]
=> Please have a look on revised l.62 ff – There, we summarize our research design in one para before we go into more detail in Section 2.1-2.3.
3) Results and conclusion -[...]
=> Thanks a lot to you for pointing us to this – we now explicitly elaborate on them in Section 3, including a new Table 3 and Appendix with detailed results displayed from factor analysis.
4) English language - It needs to be improved along with the entire text of the manuscript.
=> Done!
Editorial and stylistic suggestions
=> Your specific suggestions are highly appreciated – accordingly, we removed all these flaws and thoroughly revised the rest of the text. However, some Figures or Table still do not follow directly after the para where they are first time mentioned due to layout reasonsReviewer 3 Report
Thank you for submitting your paper. It appears well-written and to the point.
Some suggestions for improvement are given below:
-Consider separating the literature review section from the Introduction, it appears odd in a research paper that there is no separate second section on literature review.
-There are mixed methods used, which is fine, as you can see the number of participants is low in each of those, so perhaps they complement each other, what are the strengths and limitations of those three methods?
-Research hypotheses are proposed, however these cannot be formally tested yet as the study is exploratory, so perhaps 'propositions' are more suitable?
-Results and Discussion are both mixed in 'Results' it is conventional to separate your own research results and then compare them in 'Discussion' with relevant up-to-date literature.
-Overall, good insights for 4PLPs.
Author Response
Thank you for submitting your paper. It appears well-written and to the point.
Some suggestions for improvement are given below:
-Consider separating the literature review section from the Introduction, it appears odd in a research paper that there is no separate second section on literature review.
=> Indeed it is odd at first sight and an earlier draft of this paper contained a separate literature review about the present status of 4PLs along 4PL solutions, 4PL providers, 4PL customer benefits. However, by doing this, our paper got more or less unreadable with recurrent repetitions of the same issues. Therefore, we decided to put the findings from our initial literature analysis into Section 3 to compare our empirical results with extant literature, as our explorative research design outlined in Section 2 resulted in research hypothesis formulation for empirical testing from a practitioner’s point of view and NOT derived from scholarly literature (which is truly a very common approach in our research domain).
-There are mixed methods used, which is fine, as you can see the number of participants is low in each of those, so perhaps they complement each other, what are the strengths and limitations of those three methods?
=> Please have a look at revised l.62ff, where we clearly outline our research design. In l.71 ff, l.99 ff and l.219 ff of Section 2 we addressed the strengths of our methods, followed by general discussion of weaknesses and limitations noted in l.577 ff in Section 4 at the end of the paper.
-Research hypotheses are proposed, however these cannot be formally tested yet as the study is exploratory, so perhaps 'propositions' are more suitable?
=> Table 1 shows an overview of research hypotheses and constructs broken down to measureable factors for the online survey that are discussed after initial formulation of each hypothesis. To make this more visible, we included construct abbreviations in the elaboration of our research hypothesis and numbered them in the text accordingly.
-Results and Discussion are both mixed in 'Results' it is conventional to separate your own research results and then compare them in 'Discussion' with relevant up-to-date literature.
=> Again, we did it this way for sake of readability. However, we now indicate this in the headline of Section 3
-Overall, good insights for 4PLPs.
=> Thank you!
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
After reading the revised version of the manuscript, I arrived at the conclusion that the most critical suggestions have successfully been implemented.
