The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sustainability Practices: A Comparative Automated Content Analysis Approach of Theory and Practice
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper approaches, in a very innovative way, the previous studies about the relations between I4.0, emerging changes to the economy, production, sustainability, and the environment, using content analysis. Although, the paper has reached a very good level, before publication, there are several aspects that need to be addressed, namely:
- The abstract needs to be revised and rewritten in the usual style of a summary of scientific paper.
- There is an apparent inconsistency between the total number of articles selected: 173; and the first sentence of the item 3.1. stating that: “Leximancer generated a total of 20 concepts and five themes from the titles, abstracts and 205 keywords of 172 articles published in 77 journals”.
- The paper could be concluded, by providing a future research agenda, based on the results: themes; and concepts; provided by the current content analysis, as well as the caveats found.
Author Response
Dear reviewer, thank you for your suggestions, they have been very helpful.
We have conducted the changes in response to your comments. Please, find attached responses to your suggestions.
Best regards,
authors
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The main problem with this article is that I do not consider it a "research paper". As long as "Sustainability" is the scientific journal paper like this should be published elsewhere. The "methodology" is based on a random selection of professional literature, newspapers and magazine. Is it a real science as we search for papers by keywords? Even if we assume that this is an acceptable methodology than still is very poor. I recommend publishing this paper as a part of some report, statistical analysis.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you for sharing your opinion with us.
I would like to emphasise that the method we used in our research is evaluated scientific method. Using a Comparative Automated Content Analysis (ACA) approach, the article compares recent scientific work on sustainable development and the fourth industrial revolution with the discourse in the news media on sustainable development and industry 4.0. We used an analytical tool Leximancer.
In recent years, various researchers have established a rigorous procedure for characterizing various content (e.g. research literature, journal articles, corporate sustainability reports, government policy, etc.) with the topic of sustainable development, technological transformation and need for sustainability processes: Such papers are:
- Amini, Bienstock, & Narcum: Status of corporate sustainability: A content analysis of Fortune 500 companies.
- Cheng & Edwards: A comparative automated content analysis approach on the review of the sharing economy discourse in tourism and hospitality;
- Kim & Kim: Sustainable Supply Chain Based on News Article and Sustainability Reports: Text Mining with Leximancer and DICTION;
- Lock & Araujo: Visualizing the triple bottom line: A large‐scale automated visual content analysis of European corporations’ website and social media images;
- Nunez-Mir et al.: An automated content analysis of forestry research: are socioecological challenges being addressed?;
- Paolone, F., Sardi, A., Sorano, E., & Ferraris, A.: Integrated processing of sustainability accounting reports: a multi-utility company case study.
- Pucihar: The digital transformation journey: a content analysis of Electronic Markets articles and Bled eConference proceedings from 2012 to 2019.
- Roblek et al.: The interaction between internet, sustainable development, and emergence of Society 5.0.;
- Sullivan et al.: Using industrial ecology and strategic management concepts to pursue the Sustainable Development Goals;
- Keller et al.: News media coverage of climate change in India 1997–2016: Using automated content analysis to assess themes and topics.
We changed the article from a research article into a review article. We have conducted the changes in response comments of the other two reviewers. We can send responses also to you. We send our paper to a professional proofreader and wait for a proofread text.
Please, feel free to contact us with any further comments, concerns, or suggestions you wish to share.
Best regards,
authors
Reviewer 3 Report
Thank you for the opportunity of reviewing your interesting article. It addresses a topic which is within the journal s scope and uses relevant literature to perform the content analysis.
Some specific issues:
- please clarify the identified gap which you are aiming at fulfilling through your article
- please clarify how the literature/articles selection was performed
- please clarify the contribution of the paper to enriching the state of knowledge and also consider enhancing the final part by providing more conclusions/implications/further directions of research etc.
Please consider verifying the language, there are some grammar/writing errors.
Good luck!
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
thank you for your suggestions, they have been very helpful.
We have conducted the following changes in response to your comments. Please, find the attached document with responses.
Best regards,
authors
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
If it is the "Review" instead of "Research Paper" I do not have any further questions.
