Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper is to identify and measure the impact of the variables affecting the increase in the number of patents as a way to advance the development of policies of countries in terms of sustainable development based on innovation. It is a important topic, to improve the quality of this paper, I have the following suggestions:

1. The growth of patents is obviously related to the investment in R&D personnel and R&D funding, so what is the meaning of this paper? This argument has been discussed as early as Griliches （1979）.
2. The authors should tell us more about why you choose this variables to explain the growth of patents.
3. The paper lacks unit root test and Granger causality test for the variables.
4. The authors conclude that the larger countries tend to decrease their innovation output which is unrealistic and unreasonable, you should tell us more about it.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Title, abstract, keywords, and introduction are acceptable.

The LIterature review should be extended, it is too short and does not include relevant international sources published in high-ranked journals.

The methodology is well selected and described, i is supporting the evaluation. However:

Figure 1: no source indicated (I assume there is at least one and not the authors' finding is it)

Figure 2 should be enlargened as it is heavily to see in its current form and the regions are hard to recognize; the title word "World" is too large in comparison to the figure (map). Resources of Figure 2 are missing.

Figure 3: sources are missing.

The results section isn't appropriate. It is too short and not clear. Results should be explained better and show how the methods contributed to these appropriate results.

Discussion and conclusions category is just not acceptable, totally rewriting is needed. Conclusions should be based on the methodology and results, but here it is not the case.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I like this approach, it is useful that readers of journal can find such a multidisciplinary thinking of authors. It might be interesting (maybe for some future researches) to use mathematical approximation methods in this field, in order to calculate some prediction of values.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The author has answered the reviewer's comments well, but I still think  the paper is not innovative enough.

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors improved their paper based on the review I made previously. The article is more shape now, more sound in technical and scientific means. In its current form, it is eligible for publication in Sustainability. The topic is unique in certain terms and I am sure it is of interest to the readers.