Tenders for Institutional Communication Campaigns in the Spanish Autonomous Communities: Transparency or Digital Disinformation
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The article "Tenders for institutional communication campaigns in the era of digital disinformation" presents an interesting, original theme that fits into the topics of the journal Societies.
I present the following suggestions for improvement to the authors so that the article can be published with much better scientific quality:
- The authors should explicit that the study refers to the Spanish context, either adding a subtitle to the title or indicating it in the abstract;
- the term "digital disinformation" only appears in the title and partially in the keywords. Considering that the authors highlighted the term in the title, they should later refer in the body of the article its meaning (with the due references) and to what time period it refers.
- In line 42, the authors refer to the "post-COVID era". What is this era? Has it started yet? When?
- The introduction should contain the objectives of the article as well as a brief presentation of the structure of the article. Otherwise, the reader will only know the objectives of the study on page 5.
- The authors do not present related works so that it is possible for readers to verify the originality of the article and compare these results with those from other works.
- I think the authors could structure the article in another way: after the introduction, add a literature review section, which would include, as subsections, the current sections 2 and 3 and also the subsection with related works (which does not exist ).
- 102 contracts were analyzed, but I think that the authors should also identify the total number of contracts so that it is possible to assess the representativeness of the study and the respective margins of error in the results.
- The research hypotheses to be tested, the authors have to use statistical inference tests. Otherwise, the statements that the authors use in the final section to confirm the hypotheses, have no scientific validity.
- Figures 1 and 3 are of poor quality and readability.
Author Response
Dear Respectful Reviewer,
Thank you for your insightful suggestions, please see the attachment below to check the revisions.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This is a very interesting topic on public administration advertising and useful contributions are made in this regard by analyzing the transparency of the advertising contracts of the autonomous administration in Spain.
The structure can be improved as sections 2 and 3 should be incorporated into the first one. It is not necessary to carry out such a detailed development of the two aforementioned laws, including the description of their articles. In return, it would be advisable to delve into concepts not described, typical of what is or is not considered institutional advertising or about national and international research in this regard from a communication point of view. Neither does it refer to the assessment data of the degree of compliance with the central administration's obligations of active publicity, to then focus on the contribution of the article, which would be making this same assessment at the regional level.
It can be seen in red that an effort has been made to include more current references. Even so, more recent research should be incorporated. If the context is the current digital era, it is necessary that the appointments be more current, many of them are from more than 10 years ago, some from almost 20 years ago, and that in the digital environment is an eternity.
The paper intends to analyze institutional advertising tenders in the era of digital disinformation and yet this fact is not even mentioned in the introduction. If this fact is considered relevant to take it even to the title level, what less than to consider and deal with the phenomenon of misinformation. Not a single word in the entire text except in the title to surely make the article more attractive.
Regarding the methodology and the sample, the sample size with more than 100 contracts analyzed must be valued positively. Now it is better to explain how the 6 contracts that were chosen randomly for each autonomous community have been selected. How was this random selection carried out?
In the results chapter, it is necessary to point out the essential improvement of the incorporated figures that are not understandable at all, being zero on top ¿? The vertical axis or ordinate axis is inverted numeric. This can perhaps only be justified in figure 3, in the conclusions, where the greatest accessibility and transparency are represented, but not in the first two figures. Meanwhile, the abscissa X axis, in all of them does not even describe its variable. Why and under what criteria are some autonomous communities on the right, others in the center and others on the left? In figure 3 this does not make sense if precisely two variables are intersecting.
The conclusions are adequate by referring to current works on the subject (40 and 41) that should have been noted in the introduction.
Finally, point out the need to review some details of the translation and grammar with small details such as the cut of the words in the layout (original 77 for example).
Author Response
Dear Respectful Reviewers,
Thank you for your insightful suggestions, please see the attachment below to check the revisions.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The text deals with research on a relevant topic: institutional communication. The subject is interesting and necessary to know the state of the question of this practice in the institutions that are always so questioned. But below are some observations that, in our opinion, would proceed to improve the text.
The title is generic and does not provide valuable information in relation to the content of the article. The era of digital misinformation? What does the fact of putting "era of disinformation" contribute?
The areas for improvement that the study promises are unclear. This aspect must be reviewed although, with the methodology used, it is only possible to detect good practices and gaps that, under validated criteria, can be listed and commented. The criteria followed is not clear. In any case, these gaps are supposed to be the ones that should disappear, thus being an area for improvement that is not, as the text progresses, too clear.
Author Response
Dear Respectful Reviewers,
Thank you for your insightful suggestions, please see the attachment below to check the revisions.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The version revised by the authors represents a significant improvement to the article, which is why I consider it closer to a publishable version. However, there are still flaws that in my view need to be corrected:
- Despite the authors citing Olmo and Romero, I think it would be important to explicitly appear the word disinformation in that paragraph, as a way of explaining the meaning of the term. For me, still not clear enough, for a term that has the prominence of appearing in the title.
- Descriptive statistics is a statistical method for summarizing data in a valid and meaningful way. A good and appropriate measure is important not only for data but also for statistical methods used for hypothesis testing. Descriptive statistics is a statistical method for summarizing data in a valid and meaningful way. A good and appropriate measure is important not only for data but also for statistical methods used for hypothesis testing. But you can't use descriptive statistics for hypotheses testing. Hypothesis testing is a formal process of statistical analysis using inferential statistics. The goal of hypothesis testing is to compare populations or assess relationships between variables using samples. Thus, when you say "From a descriptive approach, this research seeks to test three hypotheses" you are committing a crass error, which cannot be admitted and which needs to be corrected. Either you withdraw the research hypotheses, because you will never be able to test them with descriptive statistics or you use inferential statistics to test the hypotheses. I like the second option more, because only with descriptive statistics your article will be poorer.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
It still makes no sense for misinformation to appear in the article title when it is not addressed at all in the article
Figure 2 does not show the name of all the autonomous communities
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
