What We Have Learned about the Characteristics and Differences of Disaster Information Behavior in Social Media—A Case Study of the 7.20 Henan Heavy Rain Flood Disaster

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks so much for your efforts here.  There is much in here that is worthy of sharing with the global academic community, principally, insights into the ways in which social media distributes disaster information in China.  The data collection is not my area of expertise though I recommend you better define Weibo in context and what you mean by Web 3.0? Why is this important? I understand of course but the reader may not.  The presentation of the data is quite complex and I think this can be simplified - perhaps by combining categories so that you reduce the visual complexity without diminishing the distinctions between categories. 

 

My major issue with your article is not in the data and data preparation but in the discussion.  This is in part, I suspect, because the paper is so data driven (some might say technologically determinist) such that it misses much context for disaster communication, and indeed other work that has focussed on social media, disaster and crisis.  My sense is that engaging with this material – see journals like Environmental Communication, Social Media and Society and follow from these – will add more depth and nuance to your analysis of the data.  This may lead to a rethink or at least reorientation to quite outrageous claims about the difference between women and men in your discussion that need to be, at the very least,  further substantiated. The conclusions are in many ways unsurprising – for example, that populations further away from disaster would not be participating in information distribution on any platform seems predictable.  And if this is significant in the Henan province, you will need to better present why this is so.

 

I’m conscious of language and the availability or additional difficulty of translations but hope that these are available to you. I’m also keen to encourage a resubmit where the authors present a more finer grained analysis and discussion of social media as it is understood and microblogged in China during a disaster event.

 

All best with your work and I hope my suggestions help.  They are offered in the spirit of collegiality and respect for your expertise and efforts so far.   

 

 

Author Response

Dear editor and reviewers,

 

We are submitting a revised of our manuscript “What we’ve learned about the characteristics and differences of disaster information behavior in social media——a case study of 7.20 Henan heavy rain flood disaster” (sustainability-2084579). We would like to thank you for giving us the opportunity to revise our manuscript.

We thank the reviewers the critical comments and helpful suggestions. We have carefully taken their comments into consideration in preparing our revision, and the revision was marked up using the “Track Changes” function in the draft. Our response to reviewer comments is shown below.

 

Reviewer 1

1. Comments and suggestions: I recommend you better define Weibo in context and what you mean by Web 3.0? Why is this important? I understand of course but the reader may not.

Response: Thank you for the comment. According to the comment, the explanation of “Sina weibo” and “Web 3.0” was added in Page 1 Lines 39-46 and Page 4 Lines 172-176.

 

2. Comments and suggestions: The presentation of the data is quite complex and I think this can be simplified - perhaps by combining categories so that you reduce the visual complexity without diminishing the distinctions between categories.

Response: We sincerely thank the reviewers for careful reading. Because the use of web-based big data (Weibo) for disaster-related issues is relatively new in recent years, we would like to present the data acquisition and pre-processing work in detail for readers so that they can better understand the subsequent analysis. Therefore, we did not simplify the section of data acquisition and data pre-processing.

 

3. Comments and suggestions: This is in part, I suspect, because the paper is so data driven (some might say technologically determinist) such that it misses much context for disaster communication, and indeed other work that has focussed on social media, disaster and crisis. My sense is that engaging with this material – see journals like Environmental Communication, Social Media and Societyand follow from these – will add more depth and nuance to your analysis of the data.  This may lead to a rethink or at least reorientation to quite outrageous claims about the difference between women and men in your discussion that need to be, at the very least, further substantiated. The conclusions are in many ways unsurprising – for example, that populations further away from disaster would not be participating in information distribution on any platform seems predictable. And if this is significant in the Henan province, you will need to better present why this is so.

Response: We sincerely appreciate the valuable comments and we are very sorry for the ambiguity caused by our careless expression. For the discussion on gender differences, we have re-written this part according to the reviewer’s suggestion, please refer to the revised manuscript in Page 12 Line 393-410. We do not emphasize the conclusion of “Females are more prone than males to overlook the disaster itself, and more likely to become “Disaster Responders” from “Tweet Viewers””. And we try to explain why females are more likely to exhibit high levels of information behavior in “*4 SOS & rescue”, “*2 Praying for safety” and “*7 Forwarding disaster situations”.

Reading the journals recommended by the reviewers we found the link between information communication and sociology to be interesting, profound, and far-reaching, and an area not previously covered by our profession, so we tried to think more precisely about other parts of the discussion that could serve as research for my subsequent work.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

In general, the manuscript is interesting, and the topic at hand is new and has not received a great deal of attention in previous studies. Even while it does not represent a significant advance in scientific discovery, it is essential for the development of relationships between society and the different stakeholders in the case of natural disasters. What piqued my interest the most was the organization of the manuscript, which, in my opinion, ought to have a more refined structure than it already does.

I recommend including four paragraphs in the introduction to describe the concept, the research gap, the contribution, and the paper's structure. The motivation has the potential to be expanded upon. You may include information regarding the necessity of conducting this research, the contribution of this article to the existing body of knowledge, etc. The discussion of the paper's originality is inadequate. In addition to the research question, the introduction must include a few words on the testable hypothesis. Please explain the significance of this work. Please discuss whether the paper has broad international applicability and interest.

In the conclusions, the research question and hypothesis must be addressed and discussed in detail, with no ambiguity. 

Demonstrate the research direction that will likely be taken in the field in the future

 

Author Response

Response to the comments on “sustainability-2084579”

 

Dear editor and reviewers,

 

We are submitting a revised of our manuscript “What we’ve learned about the characteristics and differences of disaster information behavior in social media——a case study of 7.20 Henan heavy rain flood disaster” (sustainability-2084579). We would like to thank you for giving us the opportunity to revise our manuscript.

We thank the reviewers the critical comments and helpful suggestions. We have carefully taken their comments into consideration in preparing our revision, and the revision was marked up using the “Track Changes” function in the draft. Our response to reviewer comments is shown below.

 

Reviewer 2

1. Comments and suggestions: I recommend including four paragraphs in the introduction to describe the concept, the research gap, the contribution, and the paper's structure. The motivation has the potential to be expanded upon. You may include information regarding the necessity of conducting this research, the contribution of this article to the existing body of knowledge, etc. The discussion of the paper's originality is inadequate. In addition to the research question, the introduction must include a few words on the testable hypothesis. Please explain the significance of this work. Please discuss whether the paper has broad international applicability and interest.

Response: We sincerely appreciate the valuable comments. We have re-written this part according to the reviewer’s suggestion. Please refer to the revised manuscript in Page 1-3 Line 33-127.

 

2. Comments and suggestions: In the conclusions, the research question and hypothesis must be addressed and discussed in detail, with no ambiguity.

Response: We sincerely appreciate the valuable comments. We have re-written this part according to the reviewer’s suggestion. Please refer to the revised manuscript in Page 15 Line 549-567.

 

3. Comments and suggestions: Demonstrate the research direction that will likely be taken in the field in the future.

Response: Thank you for the comment. According to the comment, the research direction that will likely be taken in the field in the future was added in Page 15 Lines 568-573.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Line 41 the words a topic that has been are duplicated.

Lines 103, 104, 105 and 106 - needs review. 

Explain better what is Sina weibo and what means the number 7.20  Hena  Heavy.

Line 362 - Is the claim by the authors? In my opnion is a sexist phrase.

Author Response

Response to the comments on “sustainability-2084579”

 

Dear editor and reviewers,

 

We are submitting a revised of our manuscript “What we’ve learned about the characteristics and differences of disaster information behavior in social media——a case study of 7.20 Henan heavy rain flood disaster” (sustainability-2084579). We would like to thank you for giving us the opportunity to revise our manuscript.

We thank the reviewers the critical comments and helpful suggestions. We have carefully taken their comments into consideration in preparing our revision, and the revision was marked up using the “Track Changes” function in the draft. Our response to reviewer comments is shown below.

Reviewer 3

1. Comments and suggestions: Line 41 the words a topic that has been are duplicated.

Response: We are really sorry for our careless mistakes. Thank you for your reminder, we’ve corrected the duplicated. Please refer to the revised manuscript in Page 2 Line 57.

 

2. Comments and suggestions: Lines 103, 104, 105 and 106 - needs review.

Response: We sincerely appreciate the valuable comments. We have re-written this part according to the reviewer’s suggestion. Please refer to the revised manuscript in Page 3 Line 136-139.

 

3. Comments and suggestions: Explain better what is Sina weibo and what means the number 7.20 Henan Heavy.

Response: Thank you for the comment. According to the comment, the explanation of “Sina weibo” and “the number 7.20 Henan Heavy” was added in Page 1 Lines 42-46, Page 4 Lines 130-135, and Page 4 Lines 172-176,

 

4. Comments and suggestions: Line 362 - Is the claim by the authors? In my opinion is a sexist phrase.

Response: We sincerely appreciate the valuable comments and we are very sorry for the ambiguity caused by our careless expression. We have corrected the relevant expression. Please refer to the revised manuscript in Page 12 Line 393-410 and Page 15 Line 553-554.

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

The paper is very well written, and studies the disaster information behavior in social media. And paper makes statistical analysis of disaster information behavior from four dimensions, such as f temporal, spatial, content, and behavioral, in order to excavate the corresponding characteristics and differences, and provides a reference for the follow-up study of disaster information behavior.

However, there are some problems, which must be solved before it is considered for publication.

First of all, there are some careless errors in the paper, such as the reverse order of temporal and spatial in Figure 2, temporal is Figure 2(a), spatial is Figure 2(b), and in page 12, there is a repeating “3)”, and in table 5, the proportions for the 20-29 age group add up to more than 200% , and it is not known whether the data are incorrect.

The second is to discover some conceptual ambiguities. In 2.3.3, the lack of a full name for GCA makes the method it refers to unclear, and the other is an illustration of Figure 3, perhaps giving evidence and methods for judging whether the content of Weibo is related to the case will be easier to understanding the content of the paper, and finally, “social distance mentioned” in 4.1, the specific meaning of this term may require a definition or an example to be convenient for the reader.

The third point is about the abstract. There is a “Sustainability” in the keyword. However, the relevance of the word to the article is weak, and “the necessity of information dissemination for disaster prevention and mitigation” mentioned in the abstract cannot be demonstrated by the article.

Finally, there are two problems about the content of the article, the first is that the precise definition of disaster information behavior is not given, so it is doubtful whether the selected data is typical or not, and the other is that the purpose and significance of the research are not clear.

Author Response

Response to the comments on “sustainability-2084579”

 

Dear editor and reviewers,

 

We are submitting a revised of our manuscript “What we’ve learned about the characteristics and differences of disaster information behavior in social media——a case study of 7.20 Henan heavy rain flood disaster” (sustainability-2084579). We would like to thank you for giving us the opportunity to revise our manuscript.

We thank the reviewers the critical comments and helpful suggestions. We have carefully taken their comments into consideration in preparing our revision, and the revision was marked up using the “Track Changes” function in the draft. Our response to reviewer comments is shown below.

Reviewer 4

1. Comments and suggestions: such as the reverse order of temporal and spatial in Figure 2, temporal is Figure 2(a), spatial is Figure 2(b), and in page 12, there is a repeating “3)”.

Response: We are really sorry for our careless mistakes. Thank you for your reminder, we’ve corrected the typo.

 

2. Comments and suggestions: in table 5, the proportions for the 20-29 age group add up to more than 200%, and it is not known whether the data are incorrect.

Response: We sincerely thank the reviewers for careful reading. After we double-checked that the data in Table 5 are correct, Figure 5 indicates the percentage of each hot comments sentiment types (Positive, Negative, Neutral and Irrelevant) in each age group, for example, these five figures shown in the red box below add up to approximately equal 100％.

 

3. Comments and suggestions: In 2.3.3, the lack of a full name for GCA makes the method it refers to unclear.

Response: According to the comment, the explanation of GCA was added in Page 7 Line 244-245.

 

4. Comments and suggestions: and the other is an illustration of Figure 3, perhaps giving evidence and methods for judging whether the content of Weibo is related to the case will be easier to understanding the content of the paper,

Response: We sincerely thank the reviewers for careful reading. We mainly carried out with Grounded Theory, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and literature information interpretation methods. And we judge the related and unrelated of the microblogs text by constructing the judgment words/phrases list item by item. We classified the hot microblogs as "related" if whose attributes/status are in the judgment words/phrases, and vice versa. For details, see 2.3.2 Data Preparation (Page 5-6).

 

5. Comments and suggestions: and finally, “social distance mentioned” in 4.1, the specific meaning of this term may require a definition or an example to be convenient for the reader.

Response: Thank you for the comment. According to the comment, the explanation of social distance was added in Page 11 Lines 364-366.

 

6. Comments and suggestions: There is a “Sustainability” in the keyword. However, the relevance of the word to the article is weak, and “the necessity of information dissemination for disaster prevention and mitigation” mentioned in the abstract cannot be demonstrated by the article.

Response: Thank you for the comment. According to the comment, we replace the keyword “Sustainability” with “China” and in the abstract it is only emphasized that the disaster information behavior is a significant human behavior. Please refer to the revised manuscript in Page 1 Line 10-11 and Line 30.

 

7. Comments and suggestions: Finally, there are two problems about the content of the article, the first is that the precise definition of disaster information behavior is not given, so it is doubtful whether the selected data is typical or not, and the other is that the purpose and significance of the research are not clear.

Response: Thank you for the comment. According to the comment, the definition of disaster information behavior was added in Page 1 Lines 36-39. And the significance of the research was clearly stated in Page 2 Lines 89-111 and Page 3 Lines 125-127.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

good