PONE-D-20-09210

Changing trends of corporate social responsibility reporting in the world-leading airlines

PLOS ONE

Dear Ms. Yang,

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Partly

Reviewer #3: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: I Don't Know

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The purpose of the peer-reviewed article is to identify the structure of airline CSR reporting in dynamics (over several years). In particular, the authors identified and investigated several research questions:

1) the structure and dynamics of sub-topics of CSR reports;

2) to identify the proportional distribution of the information between topics in CSR reports;

3) to identify the difference in the structure of airlines' CSR reports in APEC and EU.

To answer the above questions, the authors applied the well-known method of content analysis.

In general, the application of the method and statistical analysis is understandable and performed rather thoroughly. However, the rationale for the problem of airline CSR reporting and the logic of the study is not clear enough. For example, several cases of violation of passenger rights and a corruption scandal in one of the airlines were highlighted. However, the airline CSR reporting problem has quite a few aspects and the reporting structure, which, in theory, should reflect the interests of all market actors, stakeholders is indeed still under development.

The value of the research conducted by the authors could be better understood if the Contribution section of the article covered in more detail the main conclusions, forecasts or suggestions of the authors, for example, on improving the structure of airline CSR reports.

The article should be carefully read and minor inaccuracies in English corrected.

Reviewer #2: I would like to thank you editor for asking me to review this paper. It focuses on a very interesting research question, especially today after the Covid 19 outbreak since aviation industry should widen their CSR agenda.

I have some comments

At the end of the introduction, the structure of the article should be presented, ie the sections that will follow.

There is confusion in the development section of work cases. While it seems that the authors are developing scientific questions, a working hypothesis that refers to another methodology is finally being submitted. Some explanations and clarifications should be given at this point and the work hypotheses that emerge from the relevant literature should be described more effectively.

Finally, the discussion should show the contribution of authors’ results in the field of aviation industry and sustainable development as well as to corporate sustainability reporting.

Put some relative literature in section of Hypothesis deelopment

Karagiannis, I., Vouros, P., Skouloudis, A., & Evangelinos, K. (2019). Sustainability reporting, materiality, and accountability assessment in the airport industry. Business Strategy and the Environment, 28(7), 1370-1405.

Tsalis, T. A., Botsaropoulou, V. D., & Nikolaou, I. E. (2018). A methodology to evaluate the disclosure practices of organisations related to climate change risks: a case study of international airports. International Journal of Global Warming, 15(3), 257-276.

Reviewer #3: Interesting article, well written, important topic, but with room for improvement:

- Review Abstract: it's too long and should stick to objective of the paper; Sampling; methodology; conclusions.

- Quick re-reading of the paper: minor typos and needs standardization of citations in the document - sometimes uses number and other times names;

- Methodological concerns:

1. needs additional details on how the authors chose keywords for content analysis;

2. Keywords are shared across sub-topics. Given the methodology leads to overlapping. Could you show the impact on test results if you clean any overlap? otherwise you are inflating intensity across sub-topics and it is more probable that you mis-identify reporting in each sub-topic.

3. why use intensity only for testing and nothing about binary identification of keywords? Plus, your measure of reporting is highly affected by wording (longer reports). In Psychology and Impression Management literature longer explanations are associated with obfuscation and misleading users. Could your results just show airlines pretending to provide more information? You should look for alternative measures across which your results are robust – relative frequency (%) of keywords; binary frequency of keywords, etc.

4. Given potential Heteroskedasticity, I recommend non-parametric testing, at least as robustness.

5. Averaging across firms increases the difficulty to spot outliers. Yet, in the literature about CSR, firms mimic each other in the same industry. Robust analysis should include how and in what sub-topics firms deviate from average reporting. This is for instance what you find in the literature as committed vs opportunistic reporting (ex. Gonçalves, T., Gaio, C., & Costa, E. (2020). Committed vs opportunistic corporate and social responsibility reporting. Journal of Business Research.)

- Motivation: Your motivation does not link with your research questions and analysis. If you want to check whether firms that had a scandal decide to engage more in CSR you should distinguish, in test, firms with a scandal in a given year and onward versus other firms.

- Conclusions and implications: Poor job in providing implications of the research, for management, policy and stakeholders. Finally, in terms of conclusions, a general remark: Why is it important to focus on airline industry? What is specific to this context? What can we generalize to other industries?

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Dr Kristina Marintseva

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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Changing trends of corporate social responsibility reporting in the world-leading airlines

PONE-D-20-09210R1

Dear Dr. Yang,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it complies with all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you will receive an e-mail containing information on the amendments required prior to publication. When all required modifications have been addressed, you will receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will proceed to our production department and be scheduled for publication.

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With kind regards,

Stefan Cristian Gherghina, PhD. Habil.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: Kristina Marintseva

Reviewer #3: Yes: Tiago Gonçalves

ISEG Lisbon Shool of Economics & Management, Universidade de Lisboa

ADVANCE /CSG