Sustainable Project Governance: Scientometric Analysis and Emerging Trends
, Saeed Banihashemi 2,* and Binchao Deng 3
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
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This paper is about the topic of Sustainable Project Governance. |
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The problem is that despite many references do exist, there was no scientometric analysis of published materials. |
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This bibliometric review and scientometric analysis aimed at providing insights about previous work and future trends, research gaps, or research perspectives. |
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The contributions are mostly uncovering the trends in the corpus of literature, corresponding to time, countries, institutions, scholars, and cluster mapping of keywords (including a timeline clustering map). The final result is to provide research gaps and corresponding future endeavors to be taken, notably on land use, community participation, politics, climate change, and water-energy-food nexus. |
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The 5 highlights of the paper are at the end of the introduction; they should be only in the abstract and conclusions. The background is organized into three topics: Sustainability, project governance, and project success. Results are organized by statistical analyses. Discussion is organized differently. Finally, conclusions do not exactly correspond to what has been announced in the Introduction, and what has been developed in the main Results section. This lack of consistency causes some confusion when reading the paper, mostly for someone who would try to exploit this paper. I find value to this paper, but its current structure makes it difficult to capture this value. Time-based trend analysis: for 2022, we suppose the lower number of publications is because of the incomplete year, but we don’t know the ratio. For the country-based analysis: 439: « It is important to note that the majority of all these countries are developing nations, whereas China, which is ranked third, continues to be a developing nation. » I think the first term should be "developed". p11 445 « As can be observed, the US, the UK, and Australia are statistically and aesthetically the most interconnected nations on the internet ». No it’s not observable on Figure 3… And no it's not a surprise due to their common history, culture, and language. Keywords clusters are quite difficult to understand, not because they are heterogeneous, but because their composition does not seem consistent at first sight. We could put these keywords together, but we could imagine them close (not closer, but close enough) to other keywords in other clusters. Moreover, the title of the cluster is often hard to understand reading the main keywords. The clustering approach should be explained with more details, or even better improved, to get more robust and explainable clusters.
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Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The main findings of the work are not explicitly revealed in the summary, but rather they are presented in a very generic way, almost as objectives.
As indicated in the introduction section, “Sustainable Project Governance” is a very broad and complex topic involving many factors. For this reason, it is difficult to delimit the problem and clearly define the objective of the study. In this case, the objectives are defined by means of the expected contributions and the methods used, which does not allow defining this objective clearly. For example, it is indicated that it is intended to identify existing research gaps, but none are presented among the conclusions of the work.
In the "Contextual Background" section, the three complex concepts that are intended to be combined are introduced: sustainability, project governance and project success. However, it is not explained how they will be treated in the methodology presented below. How is the success or failure of the projects considered in the bibliographic search carried out?
The methodology section must also be improved in other aspects because the goodness of the results of scientometric studies depends primarily on the quality of the data obtained. However, this section very briefly describes fundamental aspects such as:
· The keywords initially used were "project governance," "green project," and "project," and later "sustainability" and "environmentally friendly" were added, but it is not clear whether other terms were used, or how the query was formulated, that is, if the search was carried out in the title, in the abstract, in the keywords, in the abstract of the articles or in all of them simultaneously.
· The initial sample obtained from the databases used is not described.
· Nor is it explained how the snowballing technique was applied.
In other words, with the information provided it is not possible to know the quality of the sample obtained nor to reproduce the query and the methods used, for example, so that other researchers can contrast or delve into some aspect.
Several improvements are also needed in the results section. Some of them are:
· Figure 2 shows the number of papers published from 2018 to 2022 and includes an invalid trend line because the last year is incomplete. The text also does not indicate on what date in 2022 the consultations were done.
· Some of the statements made need to be clarified: Line 468: “Notably, although Lund University and the University of Helsinki have published the most papers, Wageningen University has the highest centrality value”. However, the centrality value from Wageningen University in Table 2 is 0.02.
· The analysis by authors is very superficial. The main authors and the object of their works are not even indicated.
· The classification into two categories of the terms extracted from "Timeline Clustering Mapping" (Figure 8) should be better explained. It is not clear why some terms are included in each of two categories, for example, Japan is included in category 1 for sustainability, while terms such as “climate change” or “russia” are not indicated in which category they have been included.
· In the analysis called "Results of emerging words analysis" certain words from the years 2018, 2019 and 2020 stand out, but not others from 2022 such as "market" or "indonesia". In none of these cases is information provided regarding the reasons for this relevance.
Both the Results section and its subsequent discussion should be improved to better support the listed conclusions.
Other formal aspects to improve:
Numerous citations to authors or documents without the corresponding reference:
· Line 134 1987 Brundtland Report.
· Line 156 Martin and the APM Special Interest Group on Governance
· Line 196 Crawford
· Line 782 The algorithm proposed by Kleinberg
· Line 805 Lapia and Aramina
· Line 809 Thomson
· Line 814 Koppenjan
Some misprints to correct:
· Table 2 “University of “. The name should be completed.
· Line 459 “Wageningen of University”
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
There is a lot of work gone into this paper. However it cannot be accepted in its current form.
The introduction is well structured, clear and coherent.
While the literature review is comprehensive it is not sufficiently exhaustive. Most statements are backed up by only one reference. Try and include more references to back up statements/sentences.
Line 248 Muller and Judgev: Provide reference year
Research methodology provide some motivation on why Scientometric analysis was used and not systematic literature review (SLR).
section 3.3 Line 359 provide the number of papers at each filter.
The research results and discussion of results should be clearly separated into different chapters. The discussion of results need more engagement with the the current body of knowledge this section is not sufficiently robust.
The conclusions are not sufficiently robust and needs to include implications to policy, guidelines for practitioners and researchers.
The conclusions should align with the literature review and research outputs.
The references should be significantly expanded and include more references from the last 10 years. At least another 20 references should suffice.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
The paper entitled “Sustainable Project Governance: Scientometric Analysis and Emerging Trends” deals with a very current topic. In general, the aim of this work was very appreciated, nevertheless of some improvements that should be done to clarify better the reported methodology and stronger the reported findings and contribution from the standard of international research, as followed:
- On the Abstract (p.1). please consider changing the text “Based on the analyses produced by Citespace software”. From the research point of view, the tool used is a consequence of the methodology used, as any used tool will produce the results of the decided analysis. So the methodology is the relevant information to be put here which can be pointed out from chapter 3 text.
- From the bibliometric review concern, in chapter 3, section 3.1 reveals the search wording but not the search strings that were considered that should be exposed here along with the associated research question(s) to stronger the research and the review potential shortcomings
- From the data analysis concern (section 3.4) the proposed text should be all reviewed and the current text focus changed from what seems to be a promotion text of a tool (Citespace) to the details and explanation of the considered inputs, chosen analysis conditions in order to clarify better the value of the reported findings and potential limitation and biases of the study results. This information can be presented in the format of a table or figure highlighting the conditions software features/methods used and associated conditions if any (for example what were the co-occurrence level considered to the identified 15 high frequency keywording?) as it will increase the legibility of the article for the reader
- Please also considered removing from the article section 4.3 and 4.4 from the proposal as it is not clear what are there add value on the article scope. What are the SPG managerial implications of them? What are the implications of those results on the theory and practice on the SPG? What are the benefits from the SPG decision or policy makers of those results. Please, also notice also that the Country-Specific Analysis results can also be already related to the 4.3 and 4.4 results.
- The contribution of research should be much more highlighted, please highlight better the major found gaps and trends as they are the article's main claims: in the study results and discussion and especially in the conclusion (chapter 5), highlighting: What were the research gaps found from the review? What were the identified trends? Which one could or not fill the identified gaps?
- From the conclusion point of view the authors should convince the readers of this journal, that their contribution is relevant. So, several issues deserve to be deeper discussed and, in the conclusion, highlighted: What are the managerial implications from the study? What are the implications for the SPG theory and practice? How decision or policy makers could benefit from this study.
- Please also notice that chapter 5 (limitations and future works) is focused on the current limitations on artificial intelligence data exploitation and probability and stochastic-based algorithms but that is also current on outside SPG exploration, and these technical exploratory concerns were not developed in the study so please consider revised the section current text focus it on the developed study potential research shortcomings and potential biases of the associated results.
- From the editorial point of view all article's figures need to be improved (low quality was detected), and tables and figures are not aligned with the text, as well as the reference list. Also, some text size and format of some labels, for example, “Category I” needs to be revised.
- As usual, after changes are done, a new final thorough proof-reading is recommended
Please think about the previous suggestions and recommendations to improve and increase further the value add of the proposed work contributions along these lines.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Thanks for integrating my comments and those of other reviewers. There is still an improvement to this paper which is about the amount of information and how to structure it. Multiple research questions, multiple highlights, multiple analyses. My suggestion is to find a way to make this more compact, by merging, prioritizing, or restructuring elements (instead of having N elements, some are considered as sub-elements, either of an existing element or of a new element which is created ad hoc).
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have adequately incorporated the indications made in the first review so that the paper has improved significantly.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The central research questions are two many. There should be one perhaps two at most central research questions, the other questions should be sub-questions.
Otherwise the test of the changes have been made to my satisfaction
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
