PONE-D-22-25265Does Tobler's first law of geography apply to cyberspace? An exploration based on network attentionPLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

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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: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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: No

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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: 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: This study explored an interesting question that does the Tobler's first law of geography apply to cyberspace by using a good example, i.e., the event of elephant migration in southwest China. The manuscript is clearly structured and well written in English. The presented data, methods, and analysis sound reasonable. I like the topic of this study and it sheds a light on the relation of “the Tobler’s first law of geography” and “network attention in cyberspace”.

However, the main issue of this study is that the conclusions are drawn only from analysis toward the event of elephant migration in southwest China. Even though it is a good case for study this topic, the conclusions are still event specific. In other word, one would question if the conclusions drawn in this study are general and solid. Some suggestions are as follows.

(1) The authors are suggested to add “a case study of *** event” in the title. And the event should also be mentioned in the abstract.

(2) Any analysis or conclusion should be carefully expressed throughout the manuscript.

(3) This limitation should also be emphasized in the Discussion section.

(4) Some studies have investigated the distance-decay effect in cyberspace, which are suggested to be mentioned in the manuscript. And therefore, this manuscript should emphasize or narrow down to “network attention” instead of “cyberspace”.

* Liu, Y., Wang, F., Kang, C., Gao, Y. and Lu, Y., 2014. Analyzing Relatedness by Toponym Co-Occurrences on Web Pages. Transactions in GIS, 18(1), pp.89-107.

* Krings, G., Calabrese, F., Ratti, C., & Blondel, V. (2009). A gravity model for inter-city telephone communication networks. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 7003.

* Gao, S., Liu, Y., Wang, Y., & Ma, X. (2013). Discovering spatial interaction communities from mobile phone date. Transactions in GIS, 17(3), 463-481.

* ...more related literature that discuss distance-decay effect in cyberspace

(5) The authors are suggested to explain the term “network attention” earlier in the manuscript. In addition, “Internet attention” sounds better than “network attention” as “network” has a very broad meaning.

(6) In the Discussion section, the discussion about “whether the traditional laws of geography are applicable to network space-time” should be put in the first place. The limitation of the conclusions should be emphasized (i.e., conclusions are drawn from the case study).

(7) A small mistake in Page 11: “In the west, the strength of media publicity (X11) and geographical proximity (X11) passed the significance test.” The geographical proximity is X12 instead of X11.

Reviewer #2: This study aims to analyze the geographical characterize of media attention of certain event, specifically, focuses on whether the network attention following some geography law “The firs law of geography”, and further investigates the influence of geographical factors on attention. I have some comments as follow:

1. The title of this manuscript is “Does Tobler's first law of geography apply to cyberspace? An exploration based on network attention”, However, the content is little related with the topic. There is no specific experiment to verify the first law of geography, authors only conduct some conclusions from several figures. Therefore, the content does not follow the title.

2. The term ”network attention ” is easy to have ambiguity. The network usually refers to complex network. In fact, this study just refers to news attention.

3. From Figure 2, the six maps are same, it can not see the difference among these figures, which makes these maps no significant. Usually, I’m more concerned about the changing value of attention over time. For example, the attention in Province A and B are 100 and 1000 respectively on week 4, then the attention on week 7 are 400 and 1100. We can see that the changing value is 300 for Province A, while the changing value is only 100 for Province B. if we only visualize the total attention, it may miss the process of change.

4. In impact factor, the population should play an important role on attention, the more population is, the more attention should be. The population density could not reflect this phenomenon.

5. A conclusion should be given in the manuscript.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Does Tobler's first law of geography apply to internet attention? A case study of the Asian elephant northern migration event

PONE-D-22-25265R1

Dear Dr. QI,

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

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Wei Tu

Academic Editor

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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 #2: 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 #2: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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 #2: No

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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 #2: Yes

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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: The authors have addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication.

Reviewer #2: The authors have addressed all my comments, I recommend that this manuscript could be accepted for publication.

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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: Kang Liu

Reviewer #2: No

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