Circular Economy and Financial Aspects: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Suggestion

Reply

General comment: “I find the article interesting and properly structured. Moreover, the subject matter is contemporary and relevant to the economy of the 21st century. The analysis is also well-constructed and the conclusions are properly formulated.”

Dear Reviewer 1, thank you for the important suggestion below and for considering the relevance of our research.

Suggestion 1: However, I would like to suggest taking into account the results presented in the following publications, showing, that European researchers also are interested in the circural economy problems:

1.                  Batyk, I.M.; Farelnik, E.; Rakowska, J.; Maciejczak, M. Polish Cittaslow Local Governments’ Support for Renewable Energy Deployment vs. Slow City Concept. Energies 2022, 15, 201. https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/en15010201

2.                  Drejerska Nina, Vrontis Demetris, Siachou Evangelia [et al.], System solutions for the circular economy on the regional level: the case of Green Lungs of Poland. Journal for Global Business Advancement, 2020, vol. 13, no. 4, pp.447-458. DOI:10.1504/JGBA.2020.10034559

3.                  Renato L Binati, Elisa Salvetti, Anna Bzducha-Wróbel, Loreta Bašinskienė, Dalia Čižeikienė, David Bolzonella, Giovanna E Felis, Non-conventional yeasts for food and additives production in a circular economy perspective, FEMS Yeast Research, Volume 21, Issue 7, November 2021, foab052, https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1093/femsyr/foab052

4.                  From a concept to implementation of food chain within the Circular Economy paradigm : the case of Poland, in [Rivista di studi sulla sostenibilità : VIII, 1, 2018][Milano : Franco Angeli, 2018.] - Permalink: http://digital.casalini.it/10.3280/RISS2018-001007

I hope that the proposed changes would increase the interest in the publication among European researchers, which would be beneficial for the journal and for the authors of this publication.”

Dear Reviewer 1, thank you for the suggestion. We have considered in Theoretical Foundation the suggested articles, but unfortunately, we couldn’t access papers 3 and 4. We have also reaffirmed Europe's importance in Circular Economy context.

Suggestion

Reply

General comment: “The manuscript suggests a current and attractive topic for academia. The effort made is evident, but it presents conceptual errors in the methodology, an inadequate search for terms and poor analysis, which do not allow it to meet the standards of bibliometric studies.”

Dear Reviewer 2, thank you for all the valuable suggestions and for recognizing our efforts in developing this study. We hope to have addressed all your comments satisfactorily.

Suggestion 1: “Abstract: This section needs to be rewritten. The abstract should contain concisely in a single paragraph the importance of the study, the objective, methodology, results, discussion and conclusions.”

Dear Reviewer, thanks for this comment. We have rewritten the abstract to highlight the importance of the study, the objective, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusions. Please, see the new abstract in the manuscript.

Suggestion 2: “Introduction: In general terms, should revise the introduction. The literature on Circular Economy and Financial Performance is very poor. It shows few references and a lot of unsubstantiated text, which is incompatible for a prestigious journal. Moreover, the few references used do not show authors of reference in the study area.”

Dear reviewer, thank you for the recommendations for improving the introduction. The introduction section was revised, and we did our best to include all your comments. In this sense, we added relevant references in the CE area, clearly stated the objective of the paper, its importance as well as the structure of the paper. Please, see the additions in the manuscript.

Suggestion 3: “Introduction: It does not state the study's objective (it should indicate the word aim).”

As suggested, we have now clearly stated the objective of the paper, using the word “aim”.

Suggestion 4: “Introduction: It should indicate the importance of the study for the academy. In other words, a bibliometric study.”

Dear reviewer, we have better positioned our study considering the existing literature about CE and bibliometric method, and also explained how our study brings different contributions from the other papers.

Suggestion 5: “Introduction: Do not mention relevant studies in the area ("circular economy", "bibliometric"). For example Worldwide research on circular economy and environment: A bibliometric analysis (Ruiz-Real et al. 2018), research insights (Goyal et al., 2021), Circular Economy. A review and bibliometric analysis (Camón & Celma), The circular economy umbrella: Trends and gaps on integrating pathways ( Homrich & Galvao, 2018). Or together ("Circular economy & performance") Nexus of circular economy and sustainable business performance in the era of digitalization (Agrawal et al., 2021), Circular economy performance assessment methods: A systematic literature review (Sassanelli et al., 2019). Regarding the last two references, what is special about the study to make it relevant when similar studies exist?.”

Thank you for pointing out these important studies. We included the suggested references, which enhanced our paper by helping to position our study considering the existing literature about CE and bibliometric method. In this sense, as mentioned in Suggestion 4, we have clearly stated how our study brings different contributions from the other papers. Please, see the last three paragraphs of the new introduction.

Suggestion 6: “Introduction: The authors need to state how the article is going to be divided (number of sections) and what each section comprises.”

Thank you for pointing out this problem. We included a paragraph to explain the structure of the paper. Please, see the last paragraph of the introduction.

Suggestion 7: “Theoretical Foundation: There is an interesting section on the circular economy (from a historical point of view) rather than on business application (the latter should be the central point due to the subject matter). The curious thing is that "financial performance" (the second important term), which is mentioned in the title, does not appear in this section or is not mentioned at all. Therefore, the authors should agree on the content of the body or the title because it is not related.”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for the suggestion. We have renamed the Title to align in a better way the title with the objective and the results of the paper.

Suggestion 8: “Materials and Methods: This section requires complete restructuring, expansion and new references (there are practically no references for a modern and fashionable topic). Bibliometric studies have a fundamental characteristic; they must be systematic, transparent and reproducible. As far as possible, a sequence of methodological stages (steps) and a figure summarising the process should be indicated.”

Dear reviewer, thank you for pointing out this issue. To meet your recommendation, we have restructured our whole Materials and Methods section. Please, see the new structure of the Materials and Methods section in the manuscript.

Suggestion 9: “Materials and Methods: Lines 177 - 178. The above definition is almost the classic definition of Alan Pritchard from the 1960s. Use more renowned references.”

Dear reviewer, thank you for the suggestion. Our whole Materials and Methods section was restructured including new and important references, the paper from Groos and Pritchard (1969) was included. Please see section 3.

Suggestion 10: “Materials and Methods: Line 176 indicates two divisions. This is conceptually flawed. Bibliometric analyses are divided into performance and mapping. See Cobo et al. 2011 "An approach for detecting, quantifying, and visualizing the evolution of a research field: A practical application to the Fuzzy Sets Theory field".”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for the suggestion and reference indication. We have restructured the Materials and Method to make it clearer. Please see section 3.

Suggestion 11: “Materials and Methods: Why use Scopus? There are other important databases such as Web of science and Dimensions. Use arguments and references to defend your idea. Do not use the argument of Scopus itself; it must be of scientific articles.”

Dear reviewer, we have further clarified our choice of using Scopus database. Please, see the new arguments in the Section 3.1.

“For finding these studies, the database chosen was Scopus (Elsevier). The Scopus platform was selected because of its vast collection with more than 73 million records in 24 thousand journals (Elsevier, 2021). Besides that, Scopus is one of the most used databases in the academic world (Kipper et al., 2019; Geraldi et al., 2011; Harzing and Alakangas, 2016).”

Suggestion 12: “Materials and Methods: Lines 230 - 232. The search is questionable. The title is about "financial performance" but is not used here. It adds terms "Finance”, "Accounting", which are not necessarily related to performance. This search is questionable and unreliable.”

Dear reviewer, thank you for the observation. It is important to point out that the search is not restricted to “circular economy” as the first search term and “Finance OR Accounting” as the second, but “circular economy” as the first and “Finance OR Accounting OR Financial Performance OR Economic Performance OR Green Finance” as the second. Thus, the search was not restricted to accounting and finance. The phrase mentioned was corrected to clarify this point. Please, see the new explanation in Sections 3.1 and 3.2, and the details presented in Table 1.

Suggestion 13: “Materials and Methods: Lines 244 - 245. Not understood. Implies that it excludes everything. Indicate the type of documents used and useful references to support your selection.”

Dear reviewer, thank you for the observation. In the first filter application, by type of document, articles published in congresses and conferences, book chapters, books, and errata were excluded, but the documents type articles, review and editorial were kept, that it resulted in 246 documents. To clarify this point, we included Table 1 which presents search criteria in the Scopus Platform step by step. Please, see the additions in the manuscript.

Suggestion 14: “Materials and Methods: Uses documents in English. Use references to validate what you have done.”

Dear reviewer, thanks for the suggestion and observation. We agree that there are important papers written in English that could replace some references written in Portuguese that were used in our study. However, some of these papers were important during the development of this paper. Thus, although we added important references in English, as suggested, we opt to maintain some studies that were developed in Portuguese.

Suggestion 15: “Materials and Methods: Why do you use all types of documents? Use references to validate what you have done.”

Thank you for pointing out this topic. It is important to say that we used different types of documents to support our introduction, theoretical review, and some of our analysis, but the bibliometric and the systematic analyses, which were the core of the paper, was restricted to articles, review, and editorial published on the journals. The different types of documents were used as the aim to subside our argumentation, but as suggested, some of those references were changed. To meet your recommendation, we have restructured our whole Materials and Methods section.

Suggestion 16: “Materials and Methods: The use of bibliometric analyses is for the analysis of large data structures to study the intellectual structure of an academic discipline, field of study, journals, countries, etc. It is considered that at least 500 records should be used in this type of analysis; if less than 300 records are used, the quality of the information is not guaranteed (Donthu et al., 2021. 10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.04.070). The database used is less than 70 records (line 253). Therefore, the authors should consider conducting a literature review and not a bibliometric analysis. The study as conceived, would be misleading in nature and unreliable in the academic world.”

Dear reviewer, thank you for pointing out this issue. To meet your recommendation, we have restructured our whole Materials and Methods section. We classified our research as a systematic literature review (SRL) and, in addition to the bibliometric analysis, we carried out a qualitative content analysis. The method followed the guidelines of important works about SRL such as of Thome et al. (2016), and Tranfield et al. (2003). Please, see the new section 3 in the manuscript and the new results added.

Suggestion 17: “Materials and Methods: The data was downloaded in March 2021 (line 109). The year 2021 ended and presents incomplete information for that year. The latest trends could not be observed. The data needs to be updated.”

Dear reviewer, thank you for the observation. As punctuated, the data was downloaded in March 2021, but the paper was developed during 2021 with the objective to be submitted to the special edition of the Sustainability journal that closed on December 2021. Thus, it was not possible the inclusion of all published papers from 2021.

Suggestion 18: “Materials and Methods: Should indicate the usefulness of the software used. What are they for? .Moreover, which relevant studies have used the software.”

Dear reviewer, thank you for the suggestion. We have further clarified our reasons to choose VosViewer software. We provided arguments based on previous studies and also examples of studies that applied the same software. Please, see the additions in the Section 3.3.

“The software used to assist data visualization and bibliometric analysis was the VOSviwer®, as it offers a detailed reading of bibliometric maps, in addition to supporting maps with more than 10 thousand items (van Eck and Waltman, 2009). Furthermore, Pan et al. (2018) found that VOSviewer is more frequently used and diffused than CiteSpace or HistCite in biblio-metric studies (e.g. Camón Luis and Celma, 2020; Cavalieri et al., 2021). Mendeley soft-ware was applied to read and organize the works analyzed, and Microsoft Excel to gener-ate graphs outside the database.”

Suggestion 19: “Materials and Methods: The methodology does not include data cleaning. Can you indicate this?.”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for the suggestion. We have restructured the Materials and Method within this point. Please see section 3.

Suggestion 20: “Materials and Methods: When applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, you should report the number of documents that remain in the process.”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for the suggestion. We made a table with the conducted steps and filtering criteria. Please see Table 1 in Section 3.2.

Suggestion 21: “Results: Most of the analyses are purely descriptive, making the paper of no academic value. Presenting figures or tables and describing them is not research work. Analyses should guide the reader to more detailed information about the manuscripts, authors, countries, and topics. Authors should provide an analysis of the content of each figure and indicate the significance of the data presented. I recommend exploring papers that do this type of bibliometric analysis. I attach an example of the hundreds of papers available online; these are MDPI and are recent according to the advances in bibliometrics (Giraldo et al. 2019 10.3390/agronomy9070352 or Carrion et al. 2021 10.3390/ijerph18189445). It should set out the contribution of each analysis to the academy. These articles set out a very appropriate structure for a Bibliometric analysis. They deal in a very interesting way with methodology, results, and discussion. The authors present several studies in Bibliometrics that can serve as examples.”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for the suggestion. We reorganized the text and to improve the analysis we include more details about the systematic review. Please see section 4, Table 6, and appendix.

Suggestion 22: “Results: Table 1 shows errors. For example, if it presents 69 documents (line 253), the table exceeds 150 documents.”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for pointing it out. We corrected it with the right figures. Please see Table 2.

Suggestion 23: “Results: Table 2 does not show relevant information from journals such as Citescore, SJR, and H-Index indicators.”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for your suggestion. We inserted in Table 3 (old Table 2) SJR and H-Index, and we did a brief explanation about these indicators, as suggested.

Suggestion 24: “Results: Table 3 is poor, as is the analysis. For example, the analysis should be interesting: What kind of research does China carry out with the three main collaborating countries? Why are most of the production centred in Europe? Etc.”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for your suggestion. We have punctuated the importance of China and Europe for the subject in section 4.3 as suggested.

Suggestion 25: “Results: I think it is sufficient to give examples. Authors should improve their analysis and content.”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for all your suggestions. To meet your recommendation, we have restructured our whole Materials and Methods section, and we improved the performance analysis. Please see Sections 3, 4, Table 6, and appendix.

Suggestion 26: “Discussion and conclusions: The discussion section lives up to its name because the authors have to discuss the results found in the research. Here, should cross-reference the figures and tables presented as generalisations of the study with the theory to determine whether aspects can affirm the existing theory or present new findings.”

Dear Reviewer 2, thank you for the important suggestions and for your contribution to improving the quality of our study. We restructured the section "Introduction", "Materials and Methods", and "analyses" with the objective of improving the paper, showing the new findings, and attending to your suggestions. We hope to have addressed all of your comments satisfactorily.

Suggestion 27: “Discussion and conclusions: Conclusions should be brief and highlight important findings, limitations or future lines of research. References should not be displayed unless it is an extraordinary case.”

Dear Reviewer 2, thank you for your observation and for all your suggestions.

Suggestion

Reply

General comment: “I find the article interesting and properly structured. Moreover, the subject matter is contemporary and relevant to the economy of the 21st century. The analysis is also well-constructed and the conclusions are properly formulated.”

Dear Reviewer 1, thank you for the important suggestion below and for considering the relevance of our research.

Suggestion 1: However, I would like to suggest taking into account the results presented in the following publications, showing, that European researchers also are interested in the circural economy problems:

1.                  Batyk, I.M.; Farelnik, E.; Rakowska, J.; Maciejczak, M. Polish Cittaslow Local Governments’ Support for Renewable Energy Deployment vs. Slow City Concept. Energies 2022, 15, 201. https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/en15010201

2.                  Drejerska Nina, Vrontis Demetris, Siachou Evangelia [et al.], System solutions for the circular economy on the regional level: the case of Green Lungs of Poland. Journal for Global Business Advancement, 2020, vol. 13, no. 4, pp.447-458. DOI:10.1504/JGBA.2020.10034559

3.                  Renato L Binati, Elisa Salvetti, Anna Bzducha-Wróbel, Loreta Bašinskienė, Dalia Čižeikienė, David Bolzonella, Giovanna E Felis, Non-conventional yeasts for food and additives production in a circular economy perspective, FEMS Yeast Research, Volume 21, Issue 7, November 2021, foab052, https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1093/femsyr/foab052

4.                  From a concept to implementation of food chain within the Circular Economy paradigm : the case of Poland, in [Rivista di studi sulla sostenibilità : VIII, 1, 2018][Milano : Franco Angeli, 2018.] - Permalink: http://digital.casalini.it/10.3280/RISS2018-001007

I hope that the proposed changes would increase the interest in the publication among European researchers, which would be beneficial for the journal and for the authors of this publication.”

Dear Reviewer 1, thank you for the suggestion. We have considered in Theoretical Foundation the suggested articles, but unfortunately, we couldn’t access papers 3 and 4. We have also reaffirmed Europe's importance in Circular Economy context.

Suggestion

Reply

General comment: “The manuscript suggests a current and attractive topic for academia. The effort made is evident, but it presents conceptual errors in the methodology, an inadequate search for terms and poor analysis, which do not allow it to meet the standards of bibliometric studies.”

Dear Reviewer 2, thank you for all the valuable suggestions and for recognizing our efforts in developing this study. We hope to have addressed all your comments satisfactorily.

Suggestion 1: “Abstract: This section needs to be rewritten. The abstract should contain concisely in a single paragraph the importance of the study, the objective, methodology, results, discussion and conclusions.”

Dear Reviewer, thanks for this comment. We have rewritten the abstract to highlight the importance of the study, the objective, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusions. Please, see the new abstract in the manuscript.

Suggestion 2: “Introduction: In general terms, should revise the introduction. The literature on Circular Economy and Financial Performance is very poor. It shows few references and a lot of unsubstantiated text, which is incompatible for a prestigious journal. Moreover, the few references used do not show authors of reference in the study area.”

Dear reviewer, thank you for the recommendations for improving the introduction. The introduction section was revised, and we did our best to include all your comments. In this sense, we added relevant references in the CE area, clearly stated the objective of the paper, its importance as well as the structure of the paper. Please, see the additions in the manuscript.

Suggestion 3: “Introduction: It does not state the study's objective (it should indicate the word aim).”

As suggested, we have now clearly stated the objective of the paper, using the word “aim”.

Suggestion 4: “Introduction: It should indicate the importance of the study for the academy. In other words, a bibliometric study.”

Dear reviewer, we have better positioned our study considering the existing literature about CE and bibliometric method, and also explained how our study brings different contributions from the other papers.

Suggestion 5: “Introduction: Do not mention relevant studies in the area ("circular economy", "bibliometric"). For example Worldwide research on circular economy and environment: A bibliometric analysis (Ruiz-Real et al. 2018), research insights (Goyal et al., 2021), Circular Economy. A review and bibliometric analysis (Camón & Celma), The circular economy umbrella: Trends and gaps on integrating pathways ( Homrich & Galvao, 2018). Or together ("Circular economy & performance") Nexus of circular economy and sustainable business performance in the era of digitalization (Agrawal et al., 2021), Circular economy performance assessment methods: A systematic literature review (Sassanelli et al., 2019). Regarding the last two references, what is special about the study to make it relevant when similar studies exist?.”

Thank you for pointing out these important studies. We included the suggested references, which enhanced our paper by helping to position our study considering the existing literature about CE and bibliometric method. In this sense, as mentioned in Suggestion 4, we have clearly stated how our study brings different contributions from the other papers. Please, see the last three paragraphs of the new introduction.

Suggestion 6: “Introduction: The authors need to state how the article is going to be divided (number of sections) and what each section comprises.”

Thank you for pointing out this problem. We included a paragraph to explain the structure of the paper. Please, see the last paragraph of the introduction.

Suggestion 7: “Theoretical Foundation: There is an interesting section on the circular economy (from a historical point of view) rather than on business application (the latter should be the central point due to the subject matter). The curious thing is that "financial performance" (the second important term), which is mentioned in the title, does not appear in this section or is not mentioned at all. Therefore, the authors should agree on the content of the body or the title because it is not related.”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for the suggestion. We have renamed the Title to align in a better way the title with the objective and the results of the paper.

Suggestion 8: “Materials and Methods: This section requires complete restructuring, expansion and new references (there are practically no references for a modern and fashionable topic). Bibliometric studies have a fundamental characteristic; they must be systematic, transparent and reproducible. As far as possible, a sequence of methodological stages (steps) and a figure summarising the process should be indicated.”

Dear reviewer, thank you for pointing out this issue. To meet your recommendation, we have restructured our whole Materials and Methods section. Please, see the new structure of the Materials and Methods section in the manuscript.

Suggestion 9: “Materials and Methods: Lines 177 - 178. The above definition is almost the classic definition of Alan Pritchard from the 1960s. Use more renowned references.”

Dear reviewer, thank you for the suggestion. Our whole Materials and Methods section was restructured including new and important references, the paper from Groos and Pritchard (1969) was included. Please see section 3.

Suggestion 10: “Materials and Methods: Line 176 indicates two divisions. This is conceptually flawed. Bibliometric analyses are divided into performance and mapping. See Cobo et al. 2011 "An approach for detecting, quantifying, and visualizing the evolution of a research field: A practical application to the Fuzzy Sets Theory field".”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for the suggestion and reference indication. We have restructured the Materials and Method to make it clearer. Please see section 3.

Suggestion 11: “Materials and Methods: Why use Scopus? There are other important databases such as Web of science and Dimensions. Use arguments and references to defend your idea. Do not use the argument of Scopus itself; it must be of scientific articles.”

Dear reviewer, we have further clarified our choice of using Scopus database. Please, see the new arguments in the Section 3.1.

“For finding these studies, the database chosen was Scopus (Elsevier). The Scopus platform was selected because of its vast collection with more than 73 million records in 24 thousand journals (Elsevier, 2021). Besides that, Scopus is one of the most used databases in the academic world (Kipper et al., 2019; Geraldi et al., 2011; Harzing and Alakangas, 2016).”

Suggestion 12: “Materials and Methods: Lines 230 - 232. The search is questionable. The title is about "financial performance" but is not used here. It adds terms "Finance”, "Accounting", which are not necessarily related to performance. This search is questionable and unreliable.”

Dear reviewer, thank you for the observation. It is important to point out that the search is not restricted to “circular economy” as the first search term and “Finance OR Accounting” as the second, but “circular economy” as the first and “Finance OR Accounting OR Financial Performance OR Economic Performance OR Green Finance” as the second. Thus, the search was not restricted to accounting and finance. The phrase mentioned was corrected to clarify this point. Please, see the new explanation in Sections 3.1 and 3.2, and the details presented in Table 1.

Suggestion 13: “Materials and Methods: Lines 244 - 245. Not understood. Implies that it excludes everything. Indicate the type of documents used and useful references to support your selection.”

Dear reviewer, thank you for the observation. In the first filter application, by type of document, articles published in congresses and conferences, book chapters, books, and errata were excluded, but the documents type articles, review and editorial were kept, that it resulted in 246 documents. To clarify this point, we included Table 1 which presents search criteria in the Scopus Platform step by step. Please, see the additions in the manuscript.

Suggestion 14: “Materials and Methods: Uses documents in English. Use references to validate what you have done.”

Dear reviewer, thanks for the suggestion and observation. We agree that there are important papers written in English that could replace some references written in Portuguese that were used in our study. However, some of these papers were important during the development of this paper. Thus, although we added important references in English, as suggested, we opt to maintain some studies that were developed in Portuguese.

Suggestion 15: “Materials and Methods: Why do you use all types of documents? Use references to validate what you have done.”

Thank you for pointing out this topic. It is important to say that we used different types of documents to support our introduction, theoretical review, and some of our analysis, but the bibliometric and the systematic analyses, which were the core of the paper, was restricted to articles, review, and editorial published on the journals. The different types of documents were used as the aim to subside our argumentation, but as suggested, some of those references were changed. To meet your recommendation, we have restructured our whole Materials and Methods section.

Suggestion 16: “Materials and Methods: The use of bibliometric analyses is for the analysis of large data structures to study the intellectual structure of an academic discipline, field of study, journals, countries, etc. It is considered that at least 500 records should be used in this type of analysis; if less than 300 records are used, the quality of the information is not guaranteed (Donthu et al., 2021. 10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.04.070). The database used is less than 70 records (line 253). Therefore, the authors should consider conducting a literature review and not a bibliometric analysis. The study as conceived, would be misleading in nature and unreliable in the academic world.”

Dear reviewer, thank you for pointing out this issue. To meet your recommendation, we have restructured our whole Materials and Methods section. We classified our research as a systematic literature review (SRL) and, in addition to the bibliometric analysis, we carried out a qualitative content analysis. The method followed the guidelines of important works about SRL such as of Thome et al. (2016), and Tranfield et al. (2003). Please, see the new section 3 in the manuscript and the new results added.

Suggestion 17: “Materials and Methods: The data was downloaded in March 2021 (line 109). The year 2021 ended and presents incomplete information for that year. The latest trends could not be observed. The data needs to be updated.”

Dear reviewer, thank you for the observation. As punctuated, the data was downloaded in March 2021, but the paper was developed during 2021 with the objective to be submitted to the special edition of the Sustainability journal that closed on December 2021. Thus, it was not possible the inclusion of all published papers from 2021.

Suggestion 18: “Materials and Methods: Should indicate the usefulness of the software used. What are they for? .Moreover, which relevant studies have used the software.”

Dear reviewer, thank you for the suggestion. We have further clarified our reasons to choose VosViewer software. We provided arguments based on previous studies and also examples of studies that applied the same software. Please, see the additions in the Section 3.3.

“The software used to assist data visualization and bibliometric analysis was the VOSviwer®, as it offers a detailed reading of bibliometric maps, in addition to supporting maps with more than 10 thousand items (van Eck and Waltman, 2009). Furthermore, Pan et al. (2018) found that VOSviewer is more frequently used and diffused than CiteSpace or HistCite in biblio-metric studies (e.g. Camón Luis and Celma, 2020; Cavalieri et al., 2021). Mendeley soft-ware was applied to read and organize the works analyzed, and Microsoft Excel to gener-ate graphs outside the database.”

Suggestion 19: “Materials and Methods: The methodology does not include data cleaning. Can you indicate this?.”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for the suggestion. We have restructured the Materials and Method within this point. Please see section 3.

Suggestion 20: “Materials and Methods: When applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, you should report the number of documents that remain in the process.”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for the suggestion. We made a table with the conducted steps and filtering criteria. Please see Table 1 in Section 3.2.

Suggestion 21: “Results: Most of the analyses are purely descriptive, making the paper of no academic value. Presenting figures or tables and describing them is not research work. Analyses should guide the reader to more detailed information about the manuscripts, authors, countries, and topics. Authors should provide an analysis of the content of each figure and indicate the significance of the data presented. I recommend exploring papers that do this type of bibliometric analysis. I attach an example of the hundreds of papers available online; these are MDPI and are recent according to the advances in bibliometrics (Giraldo et al. 2019 10.3390/agronomy9070352 or Carrion et al. 2021 10.3390/ijerph18189445). It should set out the contribution of each analysis to the academy. These articles set out a very appropriate structure for a Bibliometric analysis. They deal in a very interesting way with methodology, results, and discussion. The authors present several studies in Bibliometrics that can serve as examples.”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for the suggestion. We reorganized the text and to improve the analysis we include more details about the systematic review. Please see section 4, Table 6, and appendix.

Suggestion 22: “Results: Table 1 shows errors. For example, if it presents 69 documents (line 253), the table exceeds 150 documents.”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for pointing it out. We corrected it with the right figures. Please see Table 2.

Suggestion 23: “Results: Table 2 does not show relevant information from journals such as Citescore, SJR, and H-Index indicators.”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for your suggestion. We inserted in Table 3 (old Table 2) SJR and H-Index, and we did a brief explanation about these indicators, as suggested.

Suggestion 24: “Results: Table 3 is poor, as is the analysis. For example, the analysis should be interesting: What kind of research does China carry out with the three main collaborating countries? Why are most of the production centred in Europe? Etc.”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for your suggestion. We have punctuated the importance of China and Europe for the subject in section 4.3 as suggested.

Suggestion 25: “Results: I think it is sufficient to give examples. Authors should improve their analysis and content.”

Dear Reviewer, thank you for all your suggestions. To meet your recommendation, we have restructured our whole Materials and Methods section, and we improved the performance analysis. Please see Sections 3, 4, Table 6, and appendix.

Suggestion 26: “Discussion and conclusions: The discussion section lives up to its name because the authors have to discuss the results found in the research. Here, should cross-reference the figures and tables presented as generalisations of the study with the theory to determine whether aspects can affirm the existing theory or present new findings.”

Dear Reviewer 2, thank you for the important suggestions and for your contribution to improving the quality of our study. We restructured the section "Introduction", "Materials and Methods", and "analyses" with the objective of improving the paper, showing the new findings, and attending to your suggestions. We hope to have addressed all of your comments satisfactorily.

Suggestion 27: “Discussion and conclusions: Conclusions should be brief and highlight important findings, limitations or future lines of research. References should not be displayed unless it is an extraordinary case.”

Dear Reviewer 2, thank you for your observation and for all your suggestions.