The Editorial Note lays out the issues in unusually specific terms. According to the editors, the articles cited as References 12, 21 and 55 do not appear to support the corresponding cited statements in the paper. In other words, readers who followed those citations back to their sources would not find evidence for the claims attributed to them. This category of problem, often described in the research-integrity literature as citation misrepresentation, matters because citations function as the connective tissue of scientific argument. When a reference is attached to a claim it cannot substantiate, the evidentiary chain underlying the paper’s conclusions becomes harder to audit, even if the underlying analysis remains sound.

A fifth reference raised a different kind of alarm. The work cited as Reference 56 could not be retrieved by the editors at all, meaning the cited item either did not exist in the form described or could not be located through standard scholarly channels. The first author of the paper acknowledged that Reference 56 was introduced as an unintentional error and should have referred to Reference 55. That admission clarifies the origin of the problem, but the editors concluded that the issues surrounding References 12, 21 and 55 were not resolved. The first author did provide information intended to explain the relevance of those three citations, yet the editorial team judged that the explanation did not settle the matter.

The note also documents a concrete correction. Reference 16 in the original article contained an error, and the editors specified the correct citation: a 2023 study by Li Jinchang, Lian Ganghui and Xu Songting on digitization-driven greening as a solution to corporate green transformation under China’s dual-carbon vision, published in the Journal of Quantitative and Technological Economics. The dual-carbon agenda refers to China’s stated goals of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality before 2060, and research on how digital technologies enable corporate green transformation has become a fast-growing subfield in Chinese empirical economics. The corrected reference gives readers an accurate pointer into that literature.

The underlying 2024 study sits at the intersection of two research streams that have expanded rapidly in recent years. The first examines enterprise digitization, the process by which firms adopt digital technologies such as cloud computing, big data analytics and intelligent automation, and asks how that adoption affects productivity, innovation and profitability. The second examines the marine economy, the cluster of industries that depend on ocean and coastal resources, including marine engineering, fisheries, shipping, port logistics and offshore energy. China has made the development of its maritime economy an explicit policy priority, and listed companies in these sectors provide the kind of publicly disclosed financial data that empirical researchers need to test whether digital investment translates into measurable performance gains.

Empirical studies of this kind typically measure digitization through textual analysis of corporate annual reports, counting the frequency and context of digital-related terminology, and then relate those measures to outcomes such as return on assets, operating revenue or total factor productivity. The appeal of the approach lies in its scale: listed firms produce standardized disclosures year after year, allowing researchers to control for firm characteristics and industry effects across large panels. The vulnerability, as the Editorial Note illustrates, lies one step upstream, in the framing literature. A quantitative result can be statistically robust, but if the citations used to motivate the hypothesis, define the mechanism or position the contribution do not actually say what the paper claims they say, the interpretive scaffolding around the result weakens.

Editorial Notes of this type are a standard instrument of post-publication correction. PLOS describes them as notices published to provide readers with information relevant to an article’s interpretation, and they occupy a middle ground between a minor correction and a full retraction. A note does not invalidate the article’s data or methods; it flags specific concerns that readers should weigh when citing or building on the work. In this case, the editors chose to notify readers about unsupported citations and an unretrievable reference rather than to withdraw the paper, while explicitly stating that the citation issues were not considered resolved. That combination, a public flag plus an unresolved status, signals to the research community that the article remains in the record but under documented scrutiny.

The episode also highlights how citation errors propagate in fast-moving empirical fields. Research on digital transformation and green development in China has produced a large volume of publications in a short period, and authors under pressure to situate their work within that literature sometimes attach references loosely, particularly when citing studies published in Chinese-language journals that international reviewers may find difficult to verify. The corrected Reference 16, published in the Journal of Quantitative and Technological Economics, is exactly the kind of source that requires careful handling: a specialized Chinese economics journal whose findings on digitization and corporate greening are highly relevant to maritime-sector research but not always visible to reviewers working outside that literature. The editors’ decision to publish the full corrected citation, down to the volume, issue and page numbers, gives future readers an unambiguous anchor.

For scholars who cited or planned to cite the 2024 maritime digitization study, the practical implications are straightforward. The Editorial Note, published under DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0359695, is now part of the article’s permanent record and should be read alongside the original paper, which appeared in PLOS One in 2024 as Zhang, Chen and Zhang’s empirical study of listed enterprises in China’s maritime economy. Anyone drawing on the paper’s findings should verify the claims associated with References 12, 21, 55 and 56 against the actual sources, and should use the corrected Reference 16 when discussing digitization-driven greening under the dual-carbon framework. The first author’s acknowledgment that Reference 56 was an unintentional error provides context, but the editors’ unresolved status on the other three citations means independent verification remains essential.

Beyond the specific case, the notice is a reminder of how the infrastructure of scholarly trust works in practice. Open-access publishing makes articles freely available to a global audience, which amplifies both the reach of good research and the visibility of its flaws. Editorial Notes, corrections and retractions are not failures of the system but part of its immune response, documenting problems in public so that the cumulative record can be corrected. In this instance, the editors of PLOS One have given readers a precise accounting: three citations that do not support their statements, one unretrievable reference acknowledged as an error pointing to another citation, and one reference corrected in full. For a field racing to quantify how digital technology reshapes ocean industries, that kind of transparency, uncomfortable as it is for the authors involved, is what allows subsequent research on enterprise digitization and marine economic performance to build on firmer ground.

Subject of Research: Citation integrity concerns in empirical research on enterprise digitization and marine economic performance in China

Article Title: Editorial Note: Enterprise digitization and marine economic performance: An empirical study of listed enterprises in China’s maritime economy

Article References: The PLOS One Editors (2026). Editorial Note: Enterprise digitization and marine economic performance: An empirical study of listed enterprises in China’s maritime economy. PLOS One, 21(10), e0359695. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0359695

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0359695

Keywords: PLOS One, editorial note, citation integrity, enterprise digitization, maritime economy, China, listed enterprises, blue economy, research integrity, dual-carbon, green transformation, open access