Research Status and Trends of Underwater Photosynthesis
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Nowadays, research in Photosynthesis is still a key issue in modern society and is receiving great attention every time around the world. The review entitled "Research Status and Trends of Underwater Photosynthesis" is an interesting review that seeks to serve as a basis for Underwater Photosynthesis in plants, specially.
The document is generally clear and well written. The manuscript is prepared in good order with detailed data. On the other hand, the relevance of the review is well reflected, and it can be interested for readers in general. English does not present major problems, it is well written and understandable. In addition, the data analysis is appropriately interpreted and significant. The review presents a large number of references and most of them correspond to articles from the last decade. As for the design, it is well designed, and the bibliometric data are sufficiently robust to draw its conclusions in such a way.
Author Response
Point 1: Nowadays, research in Photosynthesis is still a key issue in modern society and is receiving great attention every time around the world. The review entitled "Research Status and Trends of Underwater Photosynthesis" is an interesting review that seeks to serve as a basis for Underwater Photosynthesis in plants, specially.
Response 1:
Thank you very much for your affirmation of the topic and value of this article. In fact, we will further study the underwater photosynthesis of a submerged plant in order to supplement its waterlogging tolerance mechanism. This article will help us identify the main directions of future research.
Point 2: The document is generally clear and well written. The manuscript is prepared in good order with detailed data. On the other hand, the relevance of the review is well reflected, and it can be interested for readers in general. English does not present major problems, it is well written and understandable. In addition, the data analysis is appropriately interpreted and significant. The review presents a large number of references and most of them correspond to articles from the last decade. As for the design, it is well designed, and the bibliometric data are sufficiently robust to draw its conclusions in such a way.
Response 2:
Thank you very much for your affirmation of the language, design and conclusions of the article, your affirmation gives me confidence in the upcoming experiments. Thank you again!
Reviewer 2 Report
This article focus on the research status and trends of underwater photosynthesis. I think when author used keyword "underwater photosynthesis", there might be some research articles that were not shown under this keyword (e.g. photosynthesis research on some marine plants, seagrass, macroalgae and phytoplankton).
When I read the introduction, it seems the paper only focus on submerged plants, but at the results and discussion part include other organisms e.g. macroalgae, seagrass, phytoplankton. I think the introduction part should be improved. The importance of underwater photosynthesis should be mentioned. Why underwater photosynthesis are important to the ecosystems?
The scope of the study, the systems (marine/ freshwater/ coastal) should be identified. Only freshwater system was shown in the introduction, but the author should add more about the underwater photosynthesis in other systems e.g. marine and coastal systems, as there are other factors influencing photosynthesis in these systems.
Line 89, please add Company and country of the CiteSpace
Line 101, please add Company and country of the OriginPro and Tableau softwares
Line 121-125: How did the authors classified stages of research?
Line 141: The flowing was "Geoscience, Multidisciplinar", did the author mean "the following"?
Table 2: There might be lacking some authors who published more than 5 papers on underwater photosynthesis, but the "keyword" used might not show the results.
Table 5: Australian Research Council
Line 256: The quantum yield of photosystem II (PSII), not light system ii (PII)
Does the trend of research topic/ theme in each stage change? and How does the change? Which stage focus on which theme/ topic?
Line 278-280: How did the author conclude that "in the future, improving underwater photosynthesis.....will become a new trend"? I think this has been a trend for at least 10 years, especially the underwater photosynthesis under the climate change/ anthropogenic change condition.
Table 8: Cluster ID 4: in situ photosynthesis?
Line 403: algal photosynthesis
In the discussion / conclusion,
- the author should emphasize the implication of this work.
- the author should add the trend and future work/ future research issue on underwater photosynthesis.
Author Response
Dear reviewer：
Thank you very much for commenting on our article. You gave us a lot of good advice and helped us find unnecessary bugs. With your help, the quality of our articles has improved significantly.
For responses to specific questions please see the attachment.
Thank you again!
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors collected interesting information concerning the literature on Underwater Photosynthesis. However, the manuscript has shortcomings in the style of presentation of this information, its interpretation and drawing conclusions.
The main drawback is that the authors obviously turn their research to the biologists, but they use a lot of special terms without any explanation: centrality (line 132) and frequency (line 148) of the nodes, aggregation network (line 226), silhouette value (line 234), the Burst value (line 284), etc. I believe that all these terms, as well as the basic principles of the analysis and the interpretation of its results (e.g., of building the nodes and explanations how to interpret them) should be described to make the content of this article clear for biologists without referring to special articles on pattern analysis. It seems reasonable to add a new section for this purpose and also to give more detailed description in Methods section. And besides, in the remaining sections, it would be preferrable to give regularly biological interpretations in parallel with formal description using «node language».
Second, the conclusions of the authors are mainly descriptive, the results are not summarized, there are no clear conclusions drawn from the results. The sentence given in the Abstract («It is expected to provide reference information…», lines 19-22) seems to be almost not reflected in the main text in discussion/conclusions.
Third, the search of the literature and the analysis was based on the key words « underwater photosynthesis». But the terms often replace each other, one term can become more «fashionable» than the previous one. Hence the changes in the frequency of using some key words may reflect the shift in term usage rather than in the development status and trends of a specific research field (lines 115-116). This issue should be studied or at least mentioned in the paper.
Minor remarks:
Lines 81-81: «Choose Plain Text for file format, full record and cited references for record content» - please, reformulate.
Lines 119-121: probably, it would be better to mark (with name rather than with arrows alone) the stages in the Figure 1?
Lines 121-124: what were the criteria for identifying the stages? They need to be indicated in the text.
Lines 126-128: is this a conclusion or an a priori idea? This sounds too solemn for the research paper.
Line 131-132: please, describe how the nodes were built.
Line 140: flowing -> following.
Line 174: «It is indicated that…» - where is it indicated? In the table or in the text?
Lines 185-187: «The co-authorship network showed…» - please, explain, how it showed this?
Line 221, Table 5: the sum of the percent is less than 15%. Please, mention what was with the other 85% of all publications?
Line 256: system ii (PII) -> photosystem II (PSII).
Lines 278-280: where does this conclusion come from?
Line 337: please, describe how the clusters were built.
Line 355, Table 8: situ -> in situ
Lines 369, 376: when the keywords «flooding tolerance» appeared and were most widely used, in 2005-2015 or in 2016-2021?
Lines 384-385: «The red squares represent the years in which keywords had citation bursts, the blue squares represent the years in which keywords did not» - there are only black squares.
Author Response
Dear reviewer：
Thank you very much for commenting on our article. You gave us a lot of good advice and helped us find unnecessary bugs. With your help, the quality of our articles has improved significantly. For responses to specific questions please see the attachment.
Thank you again!
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
I am satisfied with the revision. I would accept at present form.
Author Response
Point 1: I am satisfied with the revision. I would accept at present form.
Response 1:
Thank you very much for your affirmation of the current version of the article, your affirmation gives me confidence in further experiments.
Thanks again for your review of this article!
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments to the authors: The authors have taken into account almost all my comments, and I believe that the manuscript needs only minor revision. Concerning Response to Point 4.— unfortunately, the need for manual filtering of keyword-dependent search results inevitably reduces the stringency and the value of the study. Nevertheless, I realize that there may be severe difficulties in finding literature devoted to this issue. In any case, I suggest (although not insist on) adding your description of these difficulties to the “Materials and Methods” section of the manuscript (not only to the response letter). I believe that readers_should_be aware_of_these_difficulties and probable_shortcomings_of_the_study caused by them. And please, in the description, use the Boolean operators attentively. Namely, use Boolean operators instead of “+”. It seems to me that you make a mistake either when searching or when describing it. Thus, in the context “underwater + photosynthesis” you are obviously using “+” instead of Boolean operator AND, while in the context “underwater photosynthesis + macroalgae + phytoplankton” you are rather using it instead of “OR” (if it was “AND”, you would have restricted the search results rather than expended them with getting many articles unrelated to underwater photosynthesis. And one minor remark: line 193, “…between 2004 and 2020. Indicating that they…” — it seems that here should be something like “…between 2004 and 2020, indicating that they…” (in one sentence).
Besides, I would like to express my gratitude to the authors (and to the Sustainability Editorial Board supporting the relevant rules) for the very accurate highlighting of the changes made to the revised version (unfortunately, this is not a tradition in some other MDPI journals).
Author Response
Point 1: Comments to the authors: The authors have taken into account almost all my comments, and I believe that the manuscript needs only minor revision. Concerning Response to Point 4.— unfortunately, the need for manual filtering of keyword-dependent search results inevitably reduces the stringency and the value of the study. Nevertheless, I realize that there may be severe difficulties in finding literature devoted to this issue. In any case, I suggest (although not insist on) adding your description of these difficulties to the “Materials and Methods” section of the manuscript (not only to the response letter). I believe that readers_should_be aware_of_these_difficulties and probable_shortcomings_of_the_study caused by them. And please, in the description, use the Boolean operators attentively. Namely, use Boolean operators instead of “+”. It seems to me that you make a mistake either when searching or when describing it. Thus, in the context “underwater + photosynthesis” you are obviously using “+” instead of Boolean operator AND, while in the context “underwater photosynthesis + macroalgae + phytoplankton” you are rather using it instead of “OR” (if it was “AND”, you would have restricted the search results rather than expended them with getting many articles unrelated to underwater photosynthesis. And one minor remark: line 193, “…between 2004 and 2020. Indicating that they…” — it seems that here should be something like “…between 2004 and 2020, indicating that they…” (in one sentence).
Response 1:
Thank you very much for your patient explanation of using the Boolean operator, sorry I didn't pay enough attention to this question. In fact, when I searched, I used the Boolean operator (eg: TS = (underwater photosynthesis* OR macroalgae* OR phytoplankton*)), but when replying to you, I used "+" instead of "OR" for the convenience of description. After reading your explanation, I understand the difference more deeply. Regarding this issue, I have added a note to the Materials and methods section of the manuscript. （Line 89-95）
Also, "…between 2004 and 2020. Indicating that they…" has been changed to "…between 2004 and 2020, indicating that they…". （Line 202）
Thanks again for your patience in explaining!
Point 2: Besides, I would like to express my gratitude to the authors (and to the Sustainability Editorial Board supporting the relevant rules) for the very accurate highlighting of the changes made to the revised version (unfortunately, this is not a tradition in some other MDPI journals).
Response 2:
I also think that accurately highlighting changes in revisions is beneficial for reviewers to review articles. This time, in order to facilitate your review of the article, I have removed the traces of the first revision, and only retained the traces of this revision.
Thanks again for reviewing my article!
