PONE-D-23-11955Evaluation of China's provincial digital economy development level and its coupling and coordination relationship analysisPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. zhang,

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Rita Yi Man Li

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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3. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: 

"The authors are grateful for support from Fujian Province Innovation Strategy Research Program Project (2022R0028): Mechanism and Implementation Path for Empowering the Digital Economy to Promote the Transformation and Upgrading of the Manufacturing Industry in Fujian Province"

We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. 

Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: 

"Fujian Province Innovation Strategy Research Program Project (2022R0028): Mechanism and Implementation Path for Empowering the Digital Economy to Promote the Transformation and Upgrading of the Manufacturing Industry in Fujian Province"

Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

Comments for Evaluation of China's provincial digital economy development

level and its coupling and coordination relationship analysis

1. Title, remove the location, evaluation and analysis are talking about the same thing

2. Shorten the background of the research, remove Based on the National Bureau of Statistics…

3. Abstract, state originality, gap of research, practical, academic and policy contributions of the paper.

4. State the research question in introduction

5. “And found that there is a large gap between the development of China’s provincial digital economy, and the development pf digital economy in the eastern coastal provinces and cities is high.” The authors should revise this sentence since it makes the readers confused.

6. “The outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan of the …and the Vision 2035”, “The Fourteenth Five-Year Plan…” regarding the relative content, references may be required.

7. The authors should indicate the research gaps based on the past studies, and point out what gaps will be filled by this research in the introduction part.

8. The authors should make a brief introduction of the coming sections of this paper at the end of the introduction part.

9. The authors may state the research gaps, and have a detailed discussion based on the past studies at the end of the literature review part.

10. The clarify of the industrial scope of the digital economy may require reference.

11. The authors should reveal the reason of building the evaluation system in this research, why those indicators are selected?

12. The authors should make an explanation of the formula, why times 0.99 and plus 0.01? why “lnPij”?

13. A descriptive statistics table is necessary in data collecton part.

14. The resource of table2 may be revealed.

15. The content in the index evaluation should be moved to the research methods part. Add citations of entropy weight method:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2022.982828/full compare yours with this other index methods:

https://www.techscience.com/cmes/v134n3/49757

16. The policy contributions may be revealed in the conclusion part, and the limitation of this research may be mentioned in this par if possible.

17. Chao Qu and Meihui Zhang like these can show the authors’ surname only

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does the manuscript provide a valid rationale for the proposed study, with clearly identified and justified research questions?

The research question outlined is expected to address a valid academic problem or topic and contribute to the base of knowledge in the field.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Is the protocol technically sound and planned in a manner that will lead to a meaningful outcome and allow testing the stated hypotheses?

The manuscript should describe the methods in sufficient detail to prevent undisclosed flexibility in the experimental procedure or analysis pipeline, including sufficient outcome-neutral conditions (e.g. necessary controls, absence of floor or ceiling effects) to test the proposed hypotheses and a statistical power analysis where applicable. As there may be aspects of the methodology and analysis which can only be refined once the work is undertaken, authors should outline potential assumptions and explicitly describe what aspects of the proposed analyses, if any, are exploratory.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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3. Is the methodology feasible and described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicable?

Descriptions of methods and materials in the protocol should be reported in sufficient detail for another researcher to reproduce all experiments and analyses. The protocol should describe the appropriate controls, sample size calculations, and replication needed to ensure that the data are robust and reproducible.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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4. Have the authors described where all data underlying the findings will be made available when the study is complete?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception, at the time of publication. 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

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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 and, if applicable, provide comments about issues authors must address before this protocol can be accepted for publication. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about research or publication ethics.

You may also provide optional suggestions and comments to authors that they might find helpful in planning their study.

(Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: 1. The innovation of this paper needs to be highlighted in the abstract.

2. The author introduced the research background of this paper too much, but they does not explain the realistic background of this research very well

3. The literature review is not enough, the innovation of this paper and the contribution made by previous studies have not been clearly expressed.

4. Interpretation of results does not highlight important issues studied in this paper

5. Compared with the available literature, what are the theoretical contributions and application values of this study? It is suggested to enhance the corresponding discussions in the conclusion part. The following literature should be helpful for your research, the following literature should be helpful for your research：(1) Decoupling economic growth from water consumption in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, China. (2)Coordination of the Industrial-Ecological Economy in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, China.

6. English presentation requires more refinement

7. This article has obtained some interesting findings through the models, but these findings need to be further verified from theory or actual conditions. Also, further highlight the contribution of this article.

8. Discussion section is missing.

9. The structure of the full text needs to be adjusted.

Reviewer #2: The paper evaluates China's provincial digital economy development level and calculates the coupling coordination among digital product manufacturing, digital product service, digital technology application, digital factor drive, and digital efficiency improvement. It is odd for this research logic to find problems or laws in economical field, and hope authors think it more and enhance the other parts.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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PONE-D-23-11955R1Evaluation of China's provincial digital economy development level and its coupling and coordination relationshipPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Zhang,

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.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 03 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,

Rita Yi Man Li

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does the manuscript provide a valid rationale for the proposed study, with clearly identified and justified research questions?

The research question outlined is expected to address a valid academic problem or topic and contribute to the base of knowledge in the field.

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

2. Is the protocol technically sound and planned in a manner that will lead to a meaningful outcome and allow testing the stated hypotheses?

The manuscript should describe the methods in sufficient detail to prevent undisclosed flexibility in the experimental procedure or analysis pipeline, including sufficient outcome-neutral conditions (e.g. necessary controls, absence of floor or ceiling effects) to test the proposed hypotheses and a statistical power analysis where applicable. As there may be aspects of the methodology and analysis which can only be refined once the work is undertaken, authors should outline potential assumptions and explicitly describe what aspects of the proposed analyses, if any, are exploratory.

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

3. Is the methodology feasible and described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicable?

Descriptions of methods and materials in the protocol should be reported in sufficient detail for another researcher to reproduce all experiments and analyses. The protocol should describe the appropriate controls, sample size calculations, and replication needed to ensure that the data are robust and reproducible.

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors described where all data underlying the findings will be made available when the study is complete?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception, at the time of publication. 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 #3: 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 #3: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above and, if applicable, provide comments about issues authors must address before this protocol can be accepted for publication. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about research or publication ethics.

You may also provide optional suggestions and comments to authors that they might find helpful in planning their study.

(Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #3: Authors incorporate all the comments have been addressed . Also , This paper is accepted for publication

There should be an increase in references by at least 7-8 top journal articles.

Remove the little mark besides 1 in the first author

Abstract, This paper selects indicators from five industrial dimensions: digital product

manufacturing, digital product service, digital technology application, digital factor

drive and digital efficiency improvement. Why?

Location is not the main innovative / originality: Compared with previous literature, this

paper expands the sample selection to the whole country, this is not really necessary.

The measures of the digital economy that have been proposed in the literature

fall into the following four main categories: We don’t usually use two lines as a paragraph. Either expand or merge with the next paragraph.

Shorten the heading “Digital economy evaluation index system construction,

evaluation methods and results analysis Evaluation Methodology”

Table 1 Evaluation index system of digital economy, why are these indicators selected needs some explanations based on literatures.

Data sources, edit “research object of this paper is 30 provinces”

Delete Analysis of the coupling and coordination relationship of five industrial dimensions of digital economy

Research Methodology should be Research Method

What are coupling and coordination degree model?

Paragraph above Table 4, typology of coupling degree? What is that?

Copy edit “The typology of coupling degree is borrowed from Li and Cui[16] ; the typology

of coupling coordination degree is borrowed from Ge et al.[17]” and expand what did these paper say.

Table 6, Type of coupling Type of coupling coordination should be level ofxxx but how can you say that is moderate etc? It needs some evidence, e.g. citations.

Features, please change that to tick for each of the items so that we can compare.

Missing citation in p.25

Add section of discussion.

References should be standardized.

Table 4 needs citation and elaboration.

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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 #3: Yes: KASHIF ABBASS

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Evaluation of China's provincial digital economy development level and its coupling and coordination relationship

PONE-D-23-11955R2

Dear Dr. Zhang,

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,

Rita Yi Man Li

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=tfTImMsAAAAJ&hl=en

Additional Editor Comments:

The first two references may be in incorrect format. The title should also be changed to attract readers and the last two words might not be very good in title.

Reviewers' comments: