A Study on the Perception of Authenticity of Tourist Destinations and the Place Attachment of Potential Tourists—The Case of Ding Zhen’s Endorsement of Ganzi, Sichuan

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The title is in harmony with the content. The abstract is well-structured, however, the keywords could be improved to reflect the content more.

The authors elaborated a broad literature review in the topic, as a basis for their research. The methods used are appropriate to meet the research objectives.

The results are suitable for strategic measures regarding local economic development, tourism development in the region. However, the authors themselves indicated the limitations of the research. Continuing and expanding the research is strongly recommended.

I would suggest to start the titles of figures and tables with capital letter.

 

Overall, it is an interesting and valuable paper.

Author Response

Reviewer 1:

• The keywords could be improved to reflect the content more.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. We have added the keyword “user generated content”, which connects potential tourist’s emotional attitudes about authenticity perception and place attachment with online big data. Together, these keywords can generally reflect the research content, data sources and research methods of the paper.

• The methods used are appropriate to meet the research objectives.

Response: Thank you for your recognition. And in order to make the presentation of research methods more clear and easier to understand, we have added the part of Research Methods and Data Sources. Please see the revised version (page 6 of 21).

• The authors themselves indicated the limitations of the research. Continuing and expanding the research is strongly recommended.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. With the development of science and technology, it may become possible to analyze the content of pictures and videos commented by users. We will continue to pay attention and make efforts to do further research.

• I would suggest to start the titles of figures and tables with capital letter.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. We have updated the titles of all figures and tables with capital letter. Please see the revised version.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

Your works seems interesting in understanding the tourist perception, relationship and improvement of authenticity and place attachment taking the examples of Ganzi, Sinchuan, China. However, you must consider the following aspect to improve the quality of your manuscript.

1. Reform the manuscript title. Make it short.
2. Remake the abstract with important brief summary of every sections.
3. In the abstract briefly include the research methodology.
4. Explain with reference about Ding Zhen's who is he? Why is he important? His contribution to tourism, why can he be chosen as a topic of research?
5. Restructure your manuscript with 1. Introduction, 2. Literature Review 3. Research Methods and Data Sources 4. Result and Analysis 5. Conclusion and Discussion and put organize the sub sections into these and organize the framework Figure 1.
6. There are some Chinese characters appearing in the figures.
7. Explain the result focusing on the research question.
8. Research methodology needs to be explained clearly.
9. Please provide the Reliability and Validity of sentiment analysis.
10. Reform the conclusion and discussion section.
11. Provide the implication of your work.

Author Response

Reviewer 2:

• Reform the manuscript title. Make it short.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. We have shortened the title to show only the most essential information, making the title clearer and more focused. Please see the revised version.

• Remake the abstract with important brief summary of every sections.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. We have remade the abstract with important brief summary of every sections. So that readers can understand the content of the article more clearly. Please see the revised version.

• In the abstract briefly include the research methodology.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. The research methods used in this paper are already introduced in the abstract. According to the research order, the research methods mainly include Co-occurrence Network Map, TF-IDF method and emotional score calculation.

• Explain with reference about Ding Zhen's who is he? Why is he important? His contribution to tourism, why can he be chosen as a topic of research?

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. Ding Zhen and his hometown Ganzi are the cases studied in this paper. After modification, we put them in the part of Research Methods and Data Sources, and make a detailed introduction of Ding Zhen and his influence on tourism. Please see the revised version (page 6 of 21).

• Restructure your manuscript with 1. Introduction, 2. Literature Review 3. Research Methods and Data Sources 4. Result and Analysis 5. Conclusion and Discussion and put organize the sub sections into these and organize the framework Figure 1.

Response: Thank you very much for your valuable suggestion! We have already restructured the paper with these Five parts. It really makes our articles more organized! At the same time, our figure 1 has been updated accordingly, please see the revised version (page 2 of 21).

• There are some Chinese characters appearing in the figures.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. All figures have been updated and all Chinese characters have been replaced in the paper.

• Explain the result focusing on the research question.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. We had Explained the result focusing on the research question: What is the relationship between perception of authenticity and place attachment in potential tourists? The result provides a good explanation of it. Please see the revised version (page 18 of 21).

• Research methodology needs to be explained clearly.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. This paper uses Co-occurrence Network Map analyzing the four perceived degrees of authenticity of tourist destinations based on the user generated content, and uses the TF-IDF method to further calculate weight score of influencing factors. Finally, the paper verifies the influence of each dimension on place attachment by calculating comment sentiment score. Please see the revised version (page 6 of 21).

• Please provide the Reliability and Validity of sentiment analysis.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. We carefully considered and tried the reliability and validity analysis, then regretfully found that this method is not the most suitable solution for the analysis of online review data. At the same time our current method can provide a satisfactory solution for the research problem. Therefore, we will not adopt the reliability and validity analysis in this paper for the time being, but will try to apply it in future studies.

• Reform the conclusion and discussion section.

Response: Thanks for your valuable suggestion. We have revised the Summary part into Conclusion and Discussion to make the paper’s structure, content and guiding significance clearer. Please see the revised version (page 19 of 21).

• Provide the implication of your work.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. Based on the analysis results, this paper puts forward some suggestions to tourist destinations. Moreover, this paper provides a new idea for the study of authenticity and place attachment. Please see the revised version (page 20 of 21).

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors,

Despite the importance of the topic in dicussion, I believe that your article could be improved if you add some more details of the are in analysis, like a map, a brief description of the cities, their tourism approach and other data that could help the reader to understand the overall impact.

 

Also I do not feel confortable with the methodology presentation. It could be much better explained. As a reader I do not feel much clarified with the used method.

Discussion of results could also be improved.

Note that Table 2 have some chinese words in the middle, and some characters that are not correct.

 

Author Response

Reviewer 3:

• Add some more details in analysis, like a brief description of the cities, that could help the reader to understand the overall impact.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. After modification, we make a detailed introduction of Ding Zhen and his hometown Ganzi. We explain with reference about Ganzi where is it? why can he be chosen as a topic of research? Please see the revised version (page 6 of 21).

• The methodology presentation could be much better explained.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. In order to make the presentation of research methods clearer and easier to understand, we have added the part of Research Methods and Data Sources. Please see the revised version (page 6 of 21).

• Discussion of results could also be improved.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. We had Explained the result focusing on the research question: What is the relationship between perception of authenticity and place attachment in potential tourists? The result provides a good explanation of it. Please see the revised version (page 18 of 21).

• Note that Table 2 have some Chinese words in the middle, and some characters that are not correct.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. Table 2 have been updated and all Chinese characters have been replaced in the middle. The wrong characters have also been corrected. Please see the revised version (page 8 of 21).

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Author's

Thank you so much for revising your manuscript based on the comments.

It's better to include only one framework in the introduction section.

Please check section 4.2Visual Analysis of different authenticity categories based on semantic network, and fix it.

I understand that your research approach is not questionnaire type. I pointed out the reliability and validity issues if you had followed the intercoder approach for scoring or classification of words that would make your research stronger. 

 

Author Response

• It's better to include only one framework in the introduction section.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. I'm sorry that I forgot to update the framework introduction text in the INTRODUCTION section before, and it has been updated now. Please see the revised version.

• Please check section 4.2Visual Analysis of different authenticity categories based on semantic network, and fix it.

Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. Due to some problems in the translation process, some words did not correspond to each other. Now they have been revised. Accordingly, Table 5 has also been adjusted and improved. Please see the revised version.

• I pointed out the reliability and validity issues if you had followed the intercoder approach for scoring or classification of words that would make your research stronger.

Response: I appreciate this suggestion which enrich our research methodology. The scoring and classification of words we used refer to the classification of online comments of our previous studies, which can be found in related papers for details. The intercoder research method you mentioned is also excellent, and give us an inspiration, we will definitely learn more in the future.

This paper adopted the online comment method to describe the internet user's portrait or spatial-temporal characteristics in the early stage. Meanwhile, the data cleaning is able to ensure the reliability of data. Therefore, we decided to extend the reliability validity analysis you suggested in the future.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors,

Congratulations for the review. The article is much better now.

 

Author Response

Thank you very much for your congratulation. It will encourage us to further our research.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.