Current Status and Future Directions of Construction Safety Climate: Visual Analysis Based on WOS Database

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for submitting this bibliometric analysis. The following are suggestions for improving the manuscript: 

1) Thorough language revisions are required throughout the manuscript, as well as a critical look at terminology, e.g. what is 'security climate' - this sounds like an AI (google) translation of 'safety climate'. Another clear example of need for proofreading are the sentences "... although the discussions on different participants are still relatively. However, the discussion on different participants is still relatively superficial, ... ".  

2) Shorten and revise the title. Right now it describes methods. Consider revising the title so it summarizes the main finding(s) - what is the manuscript's unique contribution to science and the 'Sustainability ' journal.  

3) Keywords: Use the keywords to supplement words in the title, do not repeat words that are in the title. This will help increase citations of the article, as more people will find the article when carrying out searches.

4) The introduction is concise :), but lacks a critical look at the literature and arguments as to why there is a need for this manuscript. What is it about SC in the last five years we do not know? There are two very recent systematic reviews of SC, including a bibliographic analyses that you should present in both your introduction and discussion: Yang et al. (2023) - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2022.105973 ; Syed-Hahya et al. (2023) - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2022.08.008. How do your results build on and compare to these two studies? 

5) All table and figure titles: Design each table and figure to be understandable on their own, without reference to the text. E.g. Figure 1 title: The process of conducting the literature review regarding safety climate in construction. Add the number of articles at each stage in the figure. Do this for all tables and figures, e.g. figure two, the reader does not know what the topic is, nor what 17-22 means (you probable mean 2017-2022).

6) Table 2: Are 'Chan, Allan Hoo Shou' and Chan, Allan H. S. not the same person?? 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

We have revised the manuscript in the light of your review and correction comments, please see the attached document.

Kind regards.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper summarizes the current research on the safety climate in construction and provides a bibliometric analysis of the safety climate in quantitative and qualitative ways. Although the paper is well-organized, there are several comments to be addressed for improving the manuscript.

ABSTRACT, BACKGROUND, and LITERATURE 

In the introduction and chapters throughout the paper, the authors use two terms “safety climate” and “security climate” interchangeably. However, because these two terms carry completely different meanings, this reviewer recommends clarifying the definition of the terms or changing it.

METHODOLOGY AND RESULT

The authors filtered out the papers using some keywords. Although the process makes sense, the descriptions on it seem incorrect or confusing. The authors mentioned that there are 9,409 papers with the keyword “safety climate”, the number of literature is 758 with the keyword “construction”,  964 documents excluding conference papers, and then 755 journal papers and review papers are analyzed. This seems very confusing in terms of the terminology and the number of papers remaining in the scope. This reviewer recommends using the proper terminology carrying consistent meaning and clarifying the numbers for each filtering step.

The first line of the third paragraph of Section 2.1 may need to be rephrased.

In the later paragraphs in Section 2.1, the authors mentioned several qualifications of the research papers. This reviewer agrees with those qualifications, but it seems that these paragraphs appear all of sudden. It does make sense that the authors highlight the qualifications and consider them in the filtering process. However, additional logic and explanations are needed to connect those paragraphs with the previous paragraphs in the same section.

Throughout the entire paper, there are many format-wire issues including space and upper/lower cases. It may be due to the production process, but this reviewer found over 15 space-wise issues in the paper. Thus, this reviewer recommends conducting proofreading for improving the manuscript.

In Section 3.1, when the authors mention the year, it would be better to use the full year to avoid any possible misunderstanding.

In Section 3.2, the authors mention that there are three prominent clusters, the first centered on “SC” and “Performance”, the second centered on “Climate” …etc. However, the climate cluster in Figure 4 has the largest size. Did the authors combine the SC and Performance clusters in this statement? If so, an explanation and justification are required. Also, in the next paragraph, the authors mention “Behavior” as a frequently used keyword. However, this reviewer cannot find the keyword “Behavior” in Figures 4 and 5. These statements should be clearly based on the results and supported by the results to make the statement convincing.

In Figures 4 and 5, there is a cluster with no name in the middle.

The axis labels of Figures 6 and 7 are not readable.

DISCUSSION and CONCLUSION

The first line of Section 4.2 needs to be rephrased.

The first line of Section 4.3 needs to be rephrased.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

We have revised the manuscript in the light of your review and correction comments, please see the attached document.

Kind regards.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

- Literature review about safety climate in general may still be needed 

- Figure 1: detailed description of the methodology should be written, and the references should be cited

- Figure 4,5,8,9,10: does the size of the colored circle of the keywords has any specific meanings based on specific calculation / formula? please explain

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

We have revised the manuscript in the light of your review and correction comments, please see the attached document.

Kind regards.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

Good research but unclear contribution. It is necessary to consider conceptual research models that have been studied before and how to propose research models from safety climate research for the future

The research phenomenon and its causes are not seen in this research to show why safety climate research is very important to do. And what is the solution in solving the problem.

I think that research on safety climate in a pandemic situation has already been carried out by several researchers, so it would not be right for it to become part of future research.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

We have revised the manuscript in the light of your review and correction comments, please see the attached document.

Kind regards.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for your revisions and reply to reviewers. You have improved the manuscript, but not sufficiently enough in regards to some of the points in the previous review. The following are suggestions for improving the manuscript:

1) There is need for critical expert proofreading of the manuscript. Some sentences do not make sense (e.g. "...emphasizing its important roles in guaranteed construction process), while other sentences are very long and complicated", e.g. "Although scholars have discussed more about the influence of different project participants on the safety climate of construction projects, most of studies are still mainly focused on the influence of two groups of workers and project managers on the safety climate, the analysis of the influence of other groups involved in the project on the safety climate is still unclear yet."

2) Keywords are still overlapping with terms in the title. See previous review comment. Choose unique terms. 

3) As mentioned previously, you need to include similar recent safety climate reviews, Yang et al. (2023) - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2022.105973 ; Syed-Hahya et al. (2023) - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2022.08.008, and describe how your manuscript builds on this research.

4) Titles of all tables and figures are still ambiguous, and need to be more descriptive. If you were to show someone e.g. figure 2 – they need to be able to understand it independently of the text. Currently the title and contents are numbers and no mention of what the numbers are about (a literature review regarding safety climate in construction). A suggestion as mentioned before for Figure 1 could be: The process of conducting the literature review regarding safety climate in construction.

5) Figure 1 – put the number of articles in the boxes in the first column, e.g. Keyword search in science direct (n=11086), Further screening (n=917), Quantitative and qualitative analysis (n=531). See examples of such tables in other reviews. 

6) In the conclusions  - write the journal names in full: The analysis of the journals showed that ‘SAF SCI’，‘INT J ENV RES PUB HE’ and ‘CEM’ are the most published and high-quality journals in the field of CSC. And ‘SAF SCI’ is more prominent.

Author Response

According to your comments, we have made a complete revision of the manuscript, please refer to the attachment for detailed revisions.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx