Study and Analysis of the Implementation of 4.0 Technologies in the Agri-Food Supply Chain: A State of the Art
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Overall, the manuscript provides an original and relevant literature review on 4.0 technologies in the Agri-food supply chain. The topics covered in the review are appropriate and the manuscript brings interesting information. However, the article needs considerable improvement especially in the formatting and description of tables and figures, and also needs a thorough language review. My main considerations are described below:
line 25: Some Keywords are already in the title, such as “Agri-food supply chain” and “technologies 4.0”. I suggest replacing them with other words that are not in the title.
line 44: please provide the full nomenclature for KPI
line 49: ASC is duplicated, remove "(ASC)"
lines 74-76: Figure 1 contains two captions, one on line 74 (above figure) and one on line 76, after the figure. Please keep only the caption after the figure.
lines 83-84: “The ability to identify 'high quality' journals that Web of Science (WoS) has, [22] has 83 led to it…” the sentence contains grammatical errors, please rewrite it.
lines 97-105: The authors mention that articles published before 2017 were excluded from the analysis. However, in Figure 3, they present the publication year distribution of articles considering from 2006 onwards. The same is true for Figure 6. So why were articles published before 2017 considered to make Figures 3 and 6? This needs to be clarified
lines 129-130: Figure 4 needs to be formatted so that it shows the full name of the journals, or else it shows the abbreviated name of the journals and their full name as a footnote in the caption. The figure caption also needs to be rewritten, as the caption "Journals" is too generic and does not express all the information to be conveyed by the figure.
line 204: Table 3 needs to be formatted because it is overstepping the sheet margins and its full content are not being displayed
line 204: provide the full nomenclatures as footnotes for the acronyms shown in the Table 3
line 246: The resolution and size of the Figure 9 needs to be improved for better viewing
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
Line 3 – Remove full-stop after the word “art”
Line 4 – Use superscript after the author’s last name. For example, Morella1
Line 13 -…,it identifies and highlights the most common… Use appropriate words to convey the right meaning.
Line 12-16 – very long sentence. Break it down into couple or more sentences.
Line 21 – there is no such word as “unknowledge” in English language
Line 30 – “last” replace it with “latest”. We are currently in Industry 4.0, the last revolution was Industry 3.0.
Introduction section needs to be restructured, highlighting what is the issue (1st paragraph), why is it an issue (2nd paragraph) and how in the past/present this issue was addressed (3rd paragraph) and briefly stating how you intend to address it (4th paragraph). Finally, the structure of the paper (5th paragraph).
Line 64 – Based on ….Not sure which gaps the authors are refereeing to, please make it clear.
Line 74 – Remove the caption
RQ1 – I don’t understand what the authors are trying to say. Please rephrase it.
RQ4 – Motivation sentence needs to be rephrased
Line 82 and Line 88 – Remove the point before titles.
Section 2.3 – What does * indicate. For example, intelligen* or it should be intelligent. The author needs to clarify this and other * used in this section.
Explanation is needed for Figure 2
Table 2 needs to be restructured. For instance, Reference column needs to be Aramyan et al. [27]. Please amend all.
Line 174 – In [36]…replace it with As per Di Vaio et al. [36],
Please see the papers from https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=vatevfkAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao and https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Dj-HWAQAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao, which could help you to improve the paper.
Reference list needs to be as per MDPI style
The use of English language is very poor throughout this paper. Please proofread it from a native English speaker
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
Dear authors,
I consider interesting the topics covered in the article, however from my point of view, as the article is written at the moment, it remains in very descriptive terms without delving into the topics. From my point of view, the article should be worked on in this way before it can be accepted.
Specifically, the article says that its aim is to highlight the potential that I4.0 technologies can bring to the value chain of the food industry (ASC) and to fill some existing gaps. Authors pose three research questions. The first two questions, RQ1 and RQ3, can be abstracted from the systematic literature review carried out. Even so, it is necessary to go deeper into the articles studied to be able to really analyze the potential of these technologies in this sector.
Also the challenges that still need to be faced in appplying I4.0 in the ASC have been described in a very general way without linking them to the sector characteristics.
In relation to RQ2. What are the most relevant indicators for ASC?, This is a more general question for which a rigorous literature review has not been carried out. This is important because there are actually many articles that cover the study of indicators to assess the sustainability and performance of the value chain and in this case, some interesting indicators are proposed, but they are not rigorously analyzed or related to the rest of the article . This issue could be studied in a single article.
Author Response
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Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors have answered the questions and made all the requested corrections. Thus, I recommend the publication of the manuscript.
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
The authors reference list needs to be as per the Mdpi style
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
Dear authors,
I think that the article has improve in clarity and depth.
From my point of view the most difficult issue to solve was the question regarding indicators. I agree with you on the importance of identifying KPIs to know the degree to which technologies are being implemented. However, I do not think that the study carried out in this article answers the research question posed.
Re-Looking at the article's response of RQ3 , I believe that the suggested indicators in the paper are very interesting, but I consider that the way that this indicators have been achieved does not justify that these are the most important ones.
Maybe this issue can be solved by modifying slightly the research question regarding indicators. I suggest that you reconsider it.
Finally, I also suggest modifying the classification name given to a set of indicators from "sustainability" to "environmental sustainability" (due to only enrviromental indicators are proposed, no indicators in economic or social terms are provided within this group)
Author Response
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