PONE-D-22-26698Enhancements in yield, agronomic and zinc recovery efficiencies of rice-wheat system through bioactive zinc coated urea application in AridisolsPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Azhar,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Min Huang

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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We note that one or more of the authors are employed by a commercial company: Engro Fertilizers Limited

a. Please provide an amended Funding Statement declaring this commercial affiliation, as well as a statement regarding the Role of Funders in your study. If the funding organization did not play a role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript and only provided financial support in the form of authors' salaries and/or research materials, please review your statements relating to the author contributions, and ensure you have specifically and accurately indicated the role(s) that these authors had in your study. You can update author roles in the Author Contributions section of the online submission form.

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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: Yes

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: No

Reviewer #2: 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: 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 is a very interesting paper to investigate the Enhancements in yield, agronomic and zinc recovery efficiencies of rice-wheat system through bioactive zinc coated urea application in Aridisols. The effects of bioactive zinc coated urea are promising. However, the discussion is not enough. In addition, average of two years results were shown, however the results of each year were not shown. The interactions of year, sites and treatments were not clear. The Pearson correlation relationships among different agronomic parameters were not investigated. The novelty, in-depth of data analysis, and global relevance of the paper should be strengthen. Therefore, I suggest a moderate revision.

Reviewer #2: I have gone through the manuscript “Enhancements in yield, agronomic and zinc recovery efficiencies of rice-wheat system through bioactive zinc coated urea application in Aridisols”. I have following observations:

Overall, a nicely structured abstract. The most important data to add is the grain Zn concentration data as this is the key data when dealing with efficiencies of Zn. only comparative percentage values are provided here. It will be good to present quantitative data to present absolute impact of treatments applied.

20-21: adopt a similar treatment caption throughout MS and add Kg ha-1 at each dose.

29-30: Zinc recovery upto 9-11 folds is too high. Explain the causes of why Zinc such a high value especially when Zn source was also applied in Treatment T2 through Zn sulphate. Please revise

44: There are lot of research have been done since 2003. Please review the literature, add updated data and source.

46: Please avoid citing old references wherever possible. Cite new work on similar lines.

More information on soil type, texture, soil depth and nutrient status of soils, at least of the plough layer may be added.

118-119 Field remained flooded (∼10 cm depth) for one week after seedling transplantation, drained after one week and refilled (∼10 cm depth).....why?

Please, provide the information on how you did test the requirements of an ANOVA (homogeneity of variances and normal distribution of the residuals). Also provide information how you treated the data if the requirements were not fulfilled (data transformation?).

What about the system productivity? How the yields and economics of rice-wheat in a system mode was influenced by different treatments.

Authors have got funding from a private organization for evaluating their product and they are reporting the product as best too. This is clearly a matter of conflict of interests/ competing interests. But the authors declare that they have no competing interests. As far as I understand, they should declare it as a matter of competing interests.

Methodology and Results chapters are written well, but discussion part needs improvement. Please revise.

Table 1; ppm is not the SI unit. Please report it as mg/kg.

Table 3: Productive tillers? unit is missing. Is it in m2?

Fig. 1: In the fig. heading you are writing paddy yield, whereas in the figure it is rice yield? Please correct it, keep uniformity throughout the manuscript.

Fig. 2 & 3: Same as fig. 1. Even within figure there are 2 terms. How did you carry out the analysis for Zn concentration and uptake? Rice grain with or without husk?

Overall, the manuscript is written well, but novelty is explicitly not mentioned in the introduction chapter. Considering the importance of the subject and information generated in realistic on-farm scenario, the authors may be given a chance to improve the manuscript.

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6. 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.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: RS Bana

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PONE-D-22-26698R1Enhancements in yield, agronomic and zinc recovery efficiencies of rice-wheat system through bioactive zinc coated urea application in AridisolsPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Azhar,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Specifically, one reviewer raised concerns on the English language. Please note that PLOS ONE does not provide copyediting or proofs of accepted manuscripts. We therefore recommend that you carefully review your manuscript and correct any errors at this time.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Feb 26 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Min Huang

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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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

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

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: Yes

**********

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

**********

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 #2: The authors have addressed almost all the concerns. The authors are advised to make minor typographical and English language related corrections. The manuscript may be accepted now.

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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: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Enhancements in yield, agronomic, and zinc recovery efficiencies of rice-wheat system through bioactive zinc coated urea application in Aridisols

PONE-D-22-26698R2

Dear Dr. Azhar,

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.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Min Huang

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE