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tokens: in the diffuse ISM do not significantly alter as galaxies grow, while the dust in H ii regions and/or the surrounding dense clouds is more sensitive to the galaxy evolution. Since can be connected to dust mass surface density and also gas mass surface density (e.g., Boquien et al. 2013 ; Brinchmann et al. 2013 ; Kreckel et al. 2013 , 2016 ), one would speculate that the observed –SFR relation might stem from the more basic Kennicutt–Schmidt star formation law (Schmidt 1959 ; Kennicutt 1998a ) and leads to the – M * and –12+log(O/H) relations via the SFMS and MZR, respectively. We believe that the Kennicutt–Schmidt law can partly account for the –SFR relation; however, it cannot fully explain the observed trends along the two scaling relations due to the following reasons. First, Table 1 shows that both M * and gas-phase metallicity more strongly correlate with compared to SFR. If the –SFR relation is more fundamental and connects with M * and gas-phase metallicity via the SFMS and MZR, respectively, we would expect a stronger correlation with SFR compared to M * and gas-phase metallicity. Second, comparing with , displays stronger correlations with M * and SFR and a comparable correlation with gas-phase metallicity, implying that although exhibits very weak correlations with these physical properties, its role is still nonnegligible. Third, our partial correlation analysis discussed below suggests that when SFR is controlled, M * still moderately correlates with , and these three parameters seem to play comparable roles in the correlation. Koyama et al. ( 2019 ) speculated that the decrease of with increasing SFR at the low-SFR side originates from the relation between M * and because of the SFMS. Similarly, the correlation between and gas-phase metallicity revealed by Figure 11 also might result from the M * – relation due to the tight MZR. To test these conjectures, a partial correlation analysis is performed utilizing the R ppcor package 12 12 https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ppcor/ (Kim 2015 ). We calculate the Pearson correlation coefficients r and Spearman rank correlation coefficients ρ to see how correlates with M * , SFR, and 12+log(O/H)[N2], respectively, when the other one or two physical properties are controlled. The results are presented in Table 2 , in which the first four columns show the cases of controlling only one parameter and the last three columns are the cases of controlling two parameters simultaneously. When only one parameter is controlled, M * gives the strongest correlation with , regardless of the controlled parameters and calculation methods. Comparing with the coefficients listed in Table 1 , it is evident that all three parameters can partly explain the corresponding correlations, while M * seems to have a dominant effect. In the cases of controlling two physical properties at the same time, the effect of M * becomes much smaller compared to SFR and metallicity when considering linear correlation.