The Main Drivers to Face the Challenges of Increasing the Intelligence of Sanitary Sewage Systems in Brazilian Cities

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This an interesting work in a very relevant topic. The objective of the work and the methods are clearly presented and the manuscript is well structured. The findings based on a systematic literature overview and expert survey might be an important support to analysing and proposing novel policies for sanitation systems within developing countries. I recommend this work for publication if the authors provide a revision for the minor issues listed below.

Material and methods:

• It would be relevant to understand how the authors identified a lack of evidence/information to discard publications. Due to the very high number of literature publications that were excluded in the screening step, a more detailed detailed description of how the exploratory reading was perfomed would be very helpful.
• In lines 145 to 150 the authors describe how they defined the calculation for identifying the more relevant set of factors, which is a very relevant aspect of this work. However, these sentences here are difficult to interpret; e.g.: “…decide the most appropriated set of factors adequate to reality” or what is meant by “named according to their latent nature” or “contextualized reality”. Please consider a revision of the text here.

Results and discussion:

• Figure and table labels: Please consider providing a more detailed description of the figure to allow for a initial interpretation without reading the whole text. This improves and facilitates the reading.
• Figure 3: There are some text notations in Portuguese.  
• Table 3: Placing a colour map near the factor loadings could help to a fast identification of the main factors.
• Lines 283 to 285: I am quite puzzled if is possible to establish guidelines and rules for promoting innovation.
• Lines 299 to 302: Instead, of stating that the “drivers showed” I suggest to consider to place the experts here - as their opinion pointed to the most relevant factors.

Conclusion:

• A more detailed description of how the authors expect this work to impact policy makers, investors and managers might improve the conclusion significantly. On the other hand, is possible to consider that the detailed explanation of the concerns regarding the study limitations could be better placed along the discussion.

Language:

• Some minor revisions along the text are necessary; e.g. “identify the most priority”, often use of “so that”. Moreover, some sentences are very long.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

From the first sight the paper looks solid, however it has several drawbacks that significantly reduce the level of the paper:

1. The idea of the paper remained unclear after reading it. The paper has a title "The Main Drivers for Increasing the Intelligence of Urban Sanitary Sewage Systems", however, further investigation, in my opinion, has a very tiny link with intelligent or smart cities.

2. All the drivers, concerned by the author, may be applied to urban sanitary systems with almost no regard to smart concept. 

3. The paper itself is a mixture of the review and a survey, which unfortunately gives very few new information to connect "smart" with "sanitary"

4. A number of drivers is too long, and that can mislead the experts within survey.

5. The results look poor, as all of the drivers were considered important by at least 88% of experts (lower median value is 4.4 of 5), so there is almost no signigicant differencee between drivers.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper after revision looks better, however the link between results and smart cities remain not obvious enough. Perhaps, the title should be changed

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf