Measuring Safety Climate in the Construction Industry: A Systematic Literature Review
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Authors tried to bring the literature of safety climatic under an umbrella, however, what makes it different from other review papers need proper justification. A lot of grammar and tenses errors exist with poor paper structuring and no critical discussion. The irrelevant background has been provided which has no connectivity with the construction industry. It seems that the authors just take the data from various articles without making any connection with the topic. This study claims to be a systematic review, but it poorly follows the PRISMA statement protocol. Few of my comments which makes the paper inadequate are given below:
- The abstract is currently demonstrating the methodology. It needs to be written in an appropriate way that shows the review gap, review outcome and way forward.
- The introduction is poorly stated which should start from the background, rather than stating previous studies.
- Line 33, “Fernández et al. (2007)…” reference format is wrong.
- Line 38, what is the need of discussing the medical field?
- Line 39, The found???
- Line 41-42, “Navarro et al. (2013)…” reference format is wrong.
- Line 43, what is the need of discussing the nuclear field?
- Line 44-45, “Zohar and Luria (2005)…” reference format is wrong.
- Line 45, instead of focusing on the construction industry, why irrelevant literature is provided?
- Line 48-51, a paragraph with only 4 lines???
- Line 52, Department name should come first.
- Line 52-59, statistics data source reference is missing.
- Line 62-68, statistics data source reference is missing.
- Line 76, define the NOSACQ-50 survey.
- Line 80, wrong reference format.
- Line 104-105, why Web of Science database was not considered?
- Line 107, Google Scholar is a search engine, not a database.
- Section 2.3, keywords combination with significant operators are missing.
- Table 1 shows a huge number of articles from most of the databases indicates that the keywords combinations were not used appropriately.
- Line 152-155, were these the only limitations?
- Line 153 shows that the data was searched till Dec 2020 then why Table 1 shows the data search till July 2021? I doubt the articles extraction consistency.
- Line 166, this is such an unprofessional way to cite 43 references in a single go. It clearly shows that the focus of the authors was on the number of references rather than maintaining the quality.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
thank you for inviting me to review this manuscript. my only concern with the study is number of papers analyzed. the number of studies on safety climate is much larger, please elaborate on exclusion and inclusion criteria.
i am not able to see any discussion section that extends the extant literature by adding new aspects on basis this research.
thank you
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
This study performed a systematic literature review on the definition and measurement methods of safety climate in the construction industry. The author investigated the 735 studies related and selected the 61 papers finally. The research is well organized. However, before publishing in the ‘Sustainability’. The reviewer has some questions.
- Herein, the author explained that this study analyzed the safety climate in the construction industry. However, the author searched the literature keywords including ‘safety culture’. The safety climate and safety culture are not the same each other. The safety climate, which is often used commonly with a safety culture, tends to be a catch all term by considering people's perceptions of organizational and contextual factors. The safety climate and the safety culture focus on the scale of a construction site and the scale of a company to manage the safety accidents. If the author analyzes the safety climate in the construction industry, the contents of safety culture would be deleted.
- The author had collected the literature since 2000. For the first time, the research on safety climate in the construction industry began 1991 by Dedobbeleer and Beland. Please explain the criteria of a baseline year in detail.
- The results should be better discussed in the main body of the manuscript to enhance the understanding of future readers.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 4 Report
The paper aims to capture the trends of safety climate research in construction. This is a worthy endeavour. However, I do have several comments, some are quite major, that the authors need to address or respond to.
- Introduction: The authors specifically highlight NOSACQ-50. What is the purpose of highlighting this particular instrument to measure safety climate? I think it is better to present a broad overview of safety climate research in the introduction.
- Introduction: Following the comment above, the introduction can focus on issues or research gap which led the authors to develop the three research foci. At the moment, the reasons behind why the authors structure the review into these three sections are not clear.
- Introduction and conclusion: The authors state that the results will be used as foundational data for developing new methods of measuring safety climate in the construction industry. How can future researchers use the findings to develop new methods? Do we actually need new methods? What are the limitations of the old methods? I think the contributions of the research need further consideration. It is also better not to repeat the message in the Introduction and conclusion. The conclusion should be more appropriate in this case.
- Figure 6: United States is misspelled.
- Figure 7 and corresponding explanation: What does all industry means? Should this be all the other industries or simply other industries?
- Figure 9: What is the significance of knowing these libraries or search platforms? The figure caption does not reflect the figure since it is not about publication journals.
- Section 3.2: I don't agree that there is still much confusion about the difference between safety climate and safety culture. There was a confusion in the past, but I think most safety researchers are aware of the basic difference between the 2 terms nowadays. Even the difference presented in Table 2 is clear.
- Last paragraph of section 3.2: Some of these are not definitions. It is also unclear whether the authors focus on defining safety climate or safety culture.
- Section 3.2: Overall this section has a great potential to clarify the meanings of, and differences between, safety climate and safety culture. However, the purpose of this section is not that clear at the moment.
- Section 3.3: The meanings of the 3 methodologies and how they are applied need further clarification. Consider including one example for each methodology and link it with the measuring method to increase clarity. Also methodology may not be the right term to use. Methodology usually refers to quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research.
- Figure 11: What is a measuring model? Also I'm not sure how a literature survey can be analysed using factor analysis. Where did the data come from? Again, the definition of each classification needs to be made very clear.
- Conclusion: The implication of each finding needs to be strengthened. In similar vein, the contributions of the research should be made clear.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper has been totally improved.
Author Response
The authors appreciate the reviewer's comments.
Reviewer 2 Report
accept
Author Response
The authors appreciate the reviewer's comments.
Reviewer 3 Report
I mentioned the safety climate and safety culture are different, the author however refers to safety climate and cultures as having the same meanings. I don’t think the author was adequately addressed in my remarks.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 4 Report
Thank you for responding to the comments in a thorough way.
Author Response
The authors appreciate the reviewer's comments.
Round 3
Reviewer 3 Report
The author addressed reviewer's comments.
