Examining retweeting behavior on social networking sites from the perspective of self-presentation

Juan Shi; Kin Keung Lai; Gang Chen

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0286135

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionAugust 27, 2022
7 Dec 2022 Decision Letter - Barbara Guidi, Editor PONE-D-22-23963Examining retweeting behavior from the perspective of self-presentation on social networking sitesPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Shi, 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. The paper should be revised in order to solve all the issues highlighted by the reviewers. In particular, it is important to update the dataset which is not updated. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 21 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. 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The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. Please change "female” or "male" to "woman” or "man" as appropriate, when used as a noun (see for instance https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/bias-free-language/gender). 3. In your Methods section, please include additional information about your dataset and ensure that you have included a statement specifying whether the collection and analysis method complied with the terms and conditions for the source of the data. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] 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 ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 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 ****** 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 ****** 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: Although the paper is interesting there are several issues that needs to be addressed. 1. The abstract is not informative and needs to be improved. 2. How was the random "we randomly selected 1250 members of Twitter" done? 3. Why the period selected was 2013-2016 which maybe be outdated since with eh onset of the pandemic the constructs of interest may have changed in terms of importance. 4. Why is there a need for "log transformation". 5. There is no need for mean centering in moderation. 6. When the beta value is not significant you should not interpret the sign as it is 0. 7. The reporting rigor needs to be improved as currently there is no std error, t-values, p-values, confidence intervals. 8. Discussion is very weak and does not do a good job of comparing and contrasting with the literature. 9. Implications are very weakly developed. 10. There was no discussion of changes in explanatory power with the inclusion of the interaction effects. 11. The review is also mostly dated as old as the time the data was collected which raises another issue of applicability. 12. Relook at the limitations as some the limitations maybe raise doubt about the validity and reliability of the findings. Reviewer #2: The paper proposes an analysis concerning the retweeting behavior from the perspective of self-presentation on social networking sites. The topic of the paper is interesting, but the paper has some research issues that should be faced in order to be published. In particular, the paper should be revised in order to improve the readability. Furthermore, the main issue concerns the dataset. It seems to be limited and not up to date, and this is a big issue considering the behaviour of users that is completely changed during the years. The dataset should be reconsidered, and this is important to decide if the paper could be accepted or not. ****** 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. 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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0286135.r001
Revision 1
28 Feb 2023 Author Response 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: Although the paper is interesting there are several issues that needs to be addressed. 1. The abstract is not informative and needs to be improved. [answer]: Thank you very much for your careful reading and valuable advice. We have rewritten the abstract. Now it is well organized and much clearer than the old version. 2. How was the random "we randomly selected 1250 members of Twitter" done? [answer]: Thank you very much for raising this question. We realize that the previous introduction about data collection process is too simple. During the revision period, we crawled a new dataset from Twitter via Twitter REST API. Now we have rewritten Section 4.1 and introduce the data collection process in detail. Thank you again for your professional question! 3. Why the period selected was 2013-2016 which maybe be outdated since with eh onset of the pandemic the constructs of interest may have changed in terms of importance. [answer]: Thank you very much for your opinions on this issue. Now we have updated the data in the paper. We find that although people’s topics of interest may change due to the outbreak of the pandemic, climate change and other issues, what they often forwarded in most cases is still what they are concerned about or what they are familiar with. Detailed data analysis results and robustness check have been updated in the revised manuscript. 4. Why is there a need for "log transformation". [answer]: Thank you very much for your careful reading and insightful question! The reason why we log transform some predictors in the old manuscript is, there are great differences among the predictors in terms of their order of magnitude, which are caused by their definitions. For example, “topical familiarity” varies within the range [0,1], however, the maximum of “fans” is more than 80 million. If we do nothing about the scale problem, the coefficients of predictors with very large magnitude will be close to 0. A useful method which is always employed to tackle this problem in previous studies is log transformation. By doing this, the distribution of the predictor is close to normal distribution and the differences in their scales become much smaller than before, which can be found from Table 1 in the old manuscript. Therefore, we log transform some predictors (e.g., “Followers”, “bandwagon”) in the old manuscript. However, it is not straightforward to interpret the coefficients after the predictors are log transformed. Besides that, it will also lead to other problems such as multicollinearity. Therefore, we change our way of dealing with the scale problem in the revised manuscript. We divide predictors with large magnitude by 1.0e5 or 1.0e3. By doing this, all the predictors are on the same scale. Please refer to Table 2 and Table 3 for regression results on the new dataset. 5.There is no need for mean centering in moderation. [answer]: Thank you very much for your careful reading and valuable suggestions! We admit that there is no need for mean centering in moderation. Therefore, in the revised manuscript, we did not mean center the independent variable and the moderators. 6. When the beta value is not significant you should not interpret the sign as it is 0. [answer]: Thank you very much for your helpful suggestions! Now in the revised manuscript, we did not interpret the sign of any insignificant coefficient any more. 7. The reporting rigor needs to be improved as currently there is no std error, t-values, p-values, confidence intervals. [answer]: Thank you very much for your careful reading and helpful suggestions! We have added Table 3 to show detailed information about the fixed effect panel logit model, including std error, t-value, p-value, and confidence intervals. In Table 2, the std err of all the coefficients are in parentheses. 8.Discussion is very weak and does not do a good job of comparing and contrasting with the literature. [answer]: Thank you very much for your valuable comments! We admit that the previous discussion does not do a good job. We have rewritten the whole section, including key findings, implications and limitations. Now, we compare our findings and previous research in each paragraph of section 6.1 “Key Findings”. Our findings are highlighted and the logic is much clearer. 9.Implications are very weakly developed. [answer]: Thank you very much for your patience and insightful suggestions! We admit that the previous implications are very shallow and not well developed. We have rewritten the theoretical implications and practical implications. Now the quality of this part is greatly improved. Thank you again for your careful reading! 10.There was no discussion of changes in explanatory power with the inclusion of the interaction effects. [answer]: Thank you very much for your reminding! We have added a new row at the bottom of Table 2, which shows the changes in Pseudo R2 when new variables are added into the model. From Table 2, we can see that, after the moderators and corresponding interaction items are added into the model, the Pseudo R2 increases from 0.058 to 0.103. We also added this finding in “5.1 Data Analysis and Results” (line 438). 11.The review is also mostly dated as old as the time the data was collected which raises another issue of applicability. [answer]: Thank you very much for your careful reading and helpful suggestions! Now, we have updated almost all the literature in the paper, especially section 2 “Literature Review”. You many notice that some literature is still remained although they were published many years ago. The reason is these papers are very influential in this area and highly related with our work. For example: (4)Kim HW, Chan HC, Kankanhalli A. What motivates people to purchase digital items on virtual community websites? The desire for online self-presentation. Information systems research. 2012;23(4):1232-45. (7)Ma M, Agarwal R. Through a glass darkly: Information technology design, identity verification, and knowledge contribution in online communities. Information systems research. 2007;18(1):42-67. 12.Relook at the limitations as some the limitations maybe raise doubt about the validity and reliability of the findings. [answer]: Thank you very much for your careful reading and helpful suggestions! Now, we have rewritten this part. Hopefully, no such doubts will arise now. Reviewer #2: The paper proposes an analysis concerning the retweeting behavior from the perspective of self-presentation on social networking sites. The topic of the paper is interesting, but the paper has some research issues that should be faced in order to be published. In particular, the paper should be revised in order to improve the readability. Furthermore, the main issue concerns the dataset. It seems to be limited and not up to date, and this is a big issue considering the behaviour of users that is completely changed during the years. The dataset should be reconsidered, and this is important to decide if the paper could be accepted or not. [answer]: Thank you very much for your careful reading and helpful suggestions! Now, we have have updated the data in the paper. The validation results of hypotheses are basically consistent with those in old manuscript. Arguably, although people’s topics of interest may change due to the outbreak of the pandemic, climate change and other issues, what they often forwarded in most cases is still what they are concerned about or what they are familiar with. In addition, we have updated almost all the literature, rewritten the abstract and the discussion. Thank you again for your patience and helpful comments! https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0286135.r002
10 May 2023 Decision Letter - Barbara Guidi, Editor Examining retweeting behavior on social networking sites from the perspective of self-presentation PONE-D-22-23963R1 Dear Dr. Shi, 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. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. 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, Barbara Guidi 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 #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 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 dataset has been updated, so there are no other comment to address and the paper can be accepted as it is. ****** 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: Yes: Barbara Guidi ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0286135.r003
Formally Accepted
12 May 2023 Acceptance Letter - Barbara Guidi, Editor PONE-D-22-23963R1 Examining retweeting behavior on social networking sites from the perspective of self-presentation Dear Dr. Shi: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. 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. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Barbara Guidi Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0286135.r004

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