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Article
Peer-Review Record

The Relationship between the Political Connections and Green Innovation Development of Chinese Enterprises—Empirical Analysis Based on Panel Data of Chinese A-Share Listed Companies

Sustainability 2022, 14(20), 13543; https://doi.org/10.3390/su142013543
by Qingyuan Yang and Shaorong Xu *
Reviewer 1:
Reviewer 2: Anonymous
Reviewer 3: Anonymous
Sustainability 2022, 14(20), 13543; https://doi.org/10.3390/su142013543
Submission received: 5 August 2022 / Revised: 23 September 2022 / Accepted: 18 October 2022 / Published: 20 October 2022

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors

Your article is very interesting, and I am grateful for the opportunity to read it. I think that subject of the research is interesting, and the results of the research give a lot of new information and possibilities of further analysis.

Reading the text, I found 3 elements that I think would improve your article.

First: the results are too elaborate, if you present everything, that is, every type of exploration, you generate a chaotic effect in the article. You should select the most important tables and limit the presentation to them. What is left should only be described. For readers, every step you have taken is not important. Readers are looking for results, examples, opinions and methods, and you should show this. If you leave it in your article, there will be a huge imbalance between chapters.

Second: There is no discussion. I think about the discussion as an attempt to confront your opinion with another and The Discussion as a chapter. So, I miss both.

To increase the significance of the results, the discussion should embrace the differences and similarities among your findings and those of other scholars. The analysis of other studies and analyzes is clearly missing. Just as there is no reference to other points of view, different situation, and examples. There is no application of a scientific analysis to reality and no real discussion. All this consequently reduces the article to the research part and causes the reader to judge the quality of the research but not its purpose or conclusions.

Third: The Conclusions chapter is the weak part of your article. In my opinion conclusions are insufficient - The conclusion section should be a brief summary of article’s aim, methods and findings. But it's not here. This chapter should be extended. For me, the summary is too limited, there is no reference to your assumptions, your hypothesis or research questions. At this point, you should show references to your research and all formal aspects of your article. At the begging and at the end you should include a description of the research questions and hypotheses. Develop and explain goals. It is necessary to change the convention from the presentation of research to the presentation of results and conclusions. In general, I believe that hypotheses and research questions should be presented. The goals should be presented and explained. At the end, the conclusions should refer to each of the goals.

Summarizing.

I find your article very good. I really like your article and appreciate your work. It is interesting topic, and the conclusions could open the way for further research. You have to make some changes especially in Results, Discussion and Conclusions. But my general opinion and my assessment of your research and whole article is more than positive.

 

Good luck! 

Author Response

Dear reviewer:

Please allow me to offer you my most sincere thanks. As a novice who is still wandering outside the academic world (clearly speaking, this is my second attempt to contribute), I am very moved that you can guide my article in such detail. Remember the first time in my country ' s journal contribution, the only comments received rejection, even cannot know what is wrong with their own articles. This contribution experience is completely different from the first feeling. I can clearly feel that you, as a reviewer, sincerely hope that this paper can be improved as much as possible, and the opinions put forward are also pointed out. The problems of the paper. Allow me to reply to your questions one by one below:

In summing up the questions, I found that most of the reviewers had made suggestions about the forms. After careful consideration I found that the manuscript form is too much, enough to have about ten, which directly led to the empirical part is too long. You are quite right from the reader's point of view. Readers do not want to see the author stacking data in the article, but want to see clear results, views and methods. At the same time, I found that most of the tables can be replaced by my own description, too many tables cause confusion article structure. Therefore, I moved the unimportant tables to the attachment when I adjusted them. The original text only retained three tables that I thought were important to the hypothesis and conclusion of the paper, and merged some similar tables to reduce the number of tables.

I think your second and third comments are the most likely to change this article, because I put these two parts together when I write the paper, I hope I can answer both of your suggestions at the same time in this paragraph. After reading your comments and consulting a lot of literature, I found that the conclusion of my manuscript is really too boring, even just a simple statement. The summary should be a process to help readers re-comb the writing ideas of the article, including whether the hypothesis is verified or not, and whether it can be supported by previous research. Unfortunately, my manuscript did not do this. Then I rewrote the original summary, and in addition to combing, I added a few contributions that this article might make in practical application, rather than limiting the application to a single country. In addition, I am surprised that you put forward your opinions on the discussion. Because some of the literature ideas I read are relatively single, I do not pay enough attention to the discussion. It can be said that the ideas you put forward are very valuable and novel to me. By the way, I once tried to join the debate club, but I gave up after the interview. At that time, I felt that arguing for one thing was a meaningless thing. Later, she met with the head of the debate society. She told me that the discussion was a process of approaching the truth. The two views collided and merged with each other. With the demise and birth, human beings gradually explored the truth in the discussion, spiraling forward. Your opinion is hard not to let me think of this experience, so I refer to another author's research on the emerging markets of ' former communist countries ', and analyze why the conclusion of this paper will be contrary to the author's research conclusion. I hope that my discussion in the article can give readers more thinking.

Every time I review the article, I always cannot help but sigh that your opinion has provided me with great help, please let me thank you again.

Reviewer 2 Report

I want to congratulate the authors fot this subject and the manner to write this paper!

Still, I think the authors should develop the last part of paper (conclusions) with the limits of their paper and emphasize how they intend to combat them in the future. Where do you go from here on? What additional research methods would you use?  Also, please insist on the international dimension of the findings of this research: to what extent are these findings valuable within the worldwide context? Also, I warmly recommend a proofreading (Indusry etc…) .

Author Response

Dear reviewer:

Please allow me to offer my most sincere thanks to you, thank you for your valuable comments, in my opinion, your comments have a very big help to improve the quality of the article. Allow me to reply to your questions one by one below:

Thinking about your opinions on the end with other reviewers makes me understand that the conclusion part of my manuscript is lacking, and it is not enough in the limitations of this article and future research. In addition, I regret that the application of the manuscript's research results is too limited to a single country. Therefore, in this revision, the limitations of this paper are re-discussed. We expand these research results to the world, hoping to provide some suggestions for the green innovation level of manufacturing industry in various countries, which is also our future further research direction. We also intend to further introduce the moderating effect for further research.

After receiving your comments, we have gone through another round of careful proofreading. We adjust the relevant proper nouns. For example, we find that 'over-debt' and 'excessive debt' are used in the original manuscript. Finally, we unify them into 'excessive debt' to fit the variable setting. Some incorrect punctuations and spaces are also modified, such as 'R&D investment'. And modified part of the content.

Every time I review the article, I always cannot help but sigh that your opinion has provided me with great help, please let me thank you again.

 

Reviewer 3 Report

The subject matter is interesting and the paper has a correct structure and methodology. In general, I consider that it is well done. Although there are some formal details that need revision:

- The citation numbering is not correct in some cases, and it is recommended to review it.

- On page 16 (lines 416-425), is the numbering of the equations correct?

On the other hand, I don't know if it would be possible to move some less important table to a section of annexes.

Author Response

Dear reviewer:

Please allow me to offer my most sincere thanks to you, thank you for your valuable comments, in my opinion, your comments have a very big help to improve the quality of the article. Allow me to reply to your questions one by one below:

We found the problem you raised when we re-searched the references. For example, this sentence 'The industries are mainly energy, chemical industry and agriculture in the western regions, while the manufacturing and service industries in the east' has a citation error, which is our negligence in doing reference work. In addition, because we have cited several Chinese articles, there may be a problem that the academic system is not interoperable, so we attach a link or doi to these references.

We believe that the content of the article is not accurate enough to make you have questions related to the equation number. In the mechanism analysis, we analyzed the mediating effect of R&D investment and excessive debt ratio. Since the two share a set of equations, it now seems that our description of this aspect is not accurate enough to cause you and other readers to be ambiguous. Therefore, we adjust the relevant content and merge the two tables of mediating effect tests together, using different serial numbers, hoping that this can effectively eliminate ambiguity.

Every time I review the article, I always cannot help but sigh that your opinion has provided me with great help, please let me thank you again.

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