Strategic Alliance for Resilience in Supply Chain: A Bibliometric Analysis
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors have addressed all the comments and suggestions in a satisfactory manner. Thus, I recommend it's for acceptance.
Author Response
Action: Thanks a lot and we are grateful to you for your decision.
Reviewer 2 Report
1. This is an interesting research works where the relationships between SC resilience and collaboration are discussed by systematic literature review
2. In the methodology section, it is not clear how the three keywords were selected and why not more than 3 keywords were used.
3. It is stated that "To study the evolution of the literature more extensively, the “all years” timespan 101 was chosen", what do you mean by all years?.
4. Which software is used for this bibliometric analysis (Which R programming is used and how?)
5. Why do the authors use only WoS than other available databases (e.g. Scopus, ProQuest, PubMed, etc)?
6. Which step-by-step procedures were used to select the final number of articles (518) to review?
7. The flow diagram as presented in Figure 1 should be extended to visualize the selection criteria of the total articles from large numbers to appropriate numbers (518 articles)?
8. It is suggested to do the proofread all the way.
Author Response
1.REVIEWER’S COMMENT: This is an interesting research works where the relationships between SC resilience and collaboration are discussed by systematic literature review.
Action: Thanks a lot for your positive comments.
2.REVIEWER’S COMMENT: In the methodology section, it is not clear how the three keywords were selected and why not more than 3 keywords were used.
Action: Thanks to your accurate and constructive comments, we provided more explanation on how the keywords have been selected as follows (page3):
"…After the literature scope was determined, 8 leading experts and university professors in supply chain management have been invited to the Delphi panel and were consulted for identifying the research keywords, as one of the main important steps in bibliometric studies is selecting the research keywords …".
3.REVIEWER’S COMMENT: It is stated that "To study the evolution of the literature more extensively, the “all years” timespan 101 was chosen", what do you mean by all years?
Action: We provided more explanation to clarify as follow (page 3):
To study the evolution of the literature more extensively, the “all years” timespan was chosen. Of course there is no limitations regarding to time span of searched publications; for that we consider all relevant papers and provide a comprehensive exploring of the research in a wide time span including all years of publications indexed in WoS.
4.REVIEWER’S COMMENT: Which software is used for this bibliometric analysis (Which R programming is used and how?)
Action: We add expalanations in the paper as follows:
The R software provides many packages related to bibliometrics. Bibliometrix is one of the them which is open-source tool mostly used for quantitative research in scientometrics tools. It is necessary to say that it includes all important bibliometric methods of related analysis. Bibliometrix is a singular tool, which has been developed for graphic R language and the statistical computing based on logical bibliometric workflow. R is also a functional programming language and an object-oriented one, so creating new functions is easy do with it.
5.REVIEWER’S COMMENT: Why do the authors use only WoS than other available databases (e.g. Scopus, ProQuest, PubMed, etc)?
Action: Thank you for the this accurate and detailed comment. We added the reason of our selection as follow in 2 parts:
WOS is a most significant scientific database of reasch articles. It includes more than 12,000 assertive and brilliant academic journals from the SSCI and SCIE. Many academics and practitioners apply literature review based on this important database [126]. WoS has widely been applied in a lot of academic researches. It not only is used as a research tool across different scientific areas, but also as a dataset for large-scale data-intensive researches [127]. component. Therfore, in this study, WoS was selected as the scientific database in this study. Of course there are other databases which can be considered as further studies in future academic researches.
And in conclusion part of the paper, we add this paragraph:
Finally, there were limitations in this study that should be eliminated in future study. For example, the main data collection came from the WoS database. Scholars can also expand the database to include more publications from platforms like Google scholar or Scopus.
6.REVIEWER’S COMMENT: Which step-by-step procedures were used to select the final number of articles (518) to review?
Action: It is necessary to say that we didn’t use any selection method, as we studied and considered all available publications that have been extracted from software and analyzed all of them. In the other words, the real number of publications was 518 and we worked on all them.
7.REVIEWER’S COMMENT: The flow diagram as presented in Figure 1 should be extended to visualize the selection criteria of the total articles from large numbers to appropriate numbers (518 articles)?
Action: flow diagram has been extended as shown in figure 1, page 3.
8.REVIEWER’S COMMENT: It is suggested to do the proofread all the way.
Action: Thanks again for your valuable comments. We did it and hope this version of paper after proofread has addressed all your concerns and clarified ambiguities in the paper.
Reviewer 3 Report
As I mentioned in the first review, this paper has a consistent theoretical background based on literature research and bibliometric analysis. I appreciated the authors' effort to conduct a well-documented research based on bibliometric analysis that clarifies relevant aspects of strategic alliance and resilience in supply chain.
The authors analyze and identify gaps in the current literature and, demonstrate links between the strategic alliance and resilience in supply chain and provide valuable suggestions for future research in these two areas of major interest.
The authors included consistent management recommendations and implications, thus enhancing the scientific quality of this article. Also, added a new literature review and created a background section on Supply Chain Resilience and the Strategic Alliance.
In conclusion, I consider that all the suggested recommendations have been followed and the article has been satisfactorily revised for publication.
Author Response
Action: We are so grateful to you for the recognition of our work.
