Peer Review History
Original SubmissionAugust 19, 2020 |
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PONE-D-20-26059 How medical education survives and evolves during COVID-19: our experience and future direction PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Myung, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. The work is of interest and address issues we are all, actually facing. Please, carefully revise your manuscript accordingly with the expert reviewers comments with a response letter (point by point). Submit a revised version, at your earliest convenience. Please submit your revised manuscript by Nov 19 2020 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Cesario Bianchi Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and 2.We note that you have indicated that data from this study are available upon request. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. In your revised cover letter, please address the following prompts: a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially identifying or sensitive patient information) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. b) If there are no restrictions, please upload the minimal anonymized data set necessary to replicate your study findings as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. Please see http://www.bmj.com/content/340/bmj.c181.long for guidelines on how to de-identify and prepare clinical data for publication. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide. Additional Editor Comments (if provided): Dear Dr. Myung: Thank you for submitting your work. It was reviewed by 2 experts that found the data of interest. Reviewer #1, and myself, found that the manuscript could be more focused and the statistical analyses clearly stated and the in line with the discussion. Please, carefully revise your interesting work accordingly with the reviewers suggestions and , if you find appropriate, incorporate changes in your revised version. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Partly ********** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: No ********** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: No ********** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The theme discussed at the article is very important and currently. It's important to the other Medical Schools to know what is being done about medical education. There are a lot of medical's studentes around the world who have been affected by the pandemic, like other students. But, the Medical Schools have many hours in practical and theoretical classes, and continue the medical education is a challenge. Reviewer #2: Overall, I think this is a very interesting and timely paper as it captures real life data on the sudden change in curriculum that so many educators have been faced with. Unfortunately, this paper in some ways tries to do too many things. It gives an example of how a cirrculum can be adjusted for the current conditions, but also tries to make statements about satisfaction with the online cirriculum. I think the authors would be better served by focusing on the latter goal, and briefly describing their cirrciculum, then moving into the data driven portion of the manuscript and centering the manuscript more around the actual study than just the logistics of education during COVID. I have several additional comments/concerns: - For the evaluation of academic performance, what tests were used? Were these national standardized tests or tests specific to the university. Given that you make important comments about the academic performance not suffering from this change in curriculum, we need more details about the tests that were used to do this evaluation. - Also, on the topic of testing, you mention that tests were not standardized from year to year, how are these tests created and how much do they change year to year? - In the statistical analysis of test performance, what was the N for each class? Is the N high enough to assume normal distribution? If not, should this be reported as a median? Also, what is the standard deviation with median or standard error with mean? Need some idea of the distribution. - There are differences in how much the academic performance changed between the different subjects. Is this worth looking into further or discussing further? Was this a trend between year groups (1st vs 2nd year) or any other trend noted here? Potentially something to look at and/or discuss. - Finally, you concluded no significant differences in academic performance, yet almost all of the the p values you report are statistically significant, this must be addressed. What is your threshold for “significant” differences, the language here needs to be clear. Also, if there are subtle differences, this should not be ignored as the trend is certainly towards more online learning, so are there ways to improve this and make academic performance better? - You state that “Students pointed out the following strengths of online learning…” What exactly does this mean? Was there a focus group where students pointed out benefits and problems and then the Leikert scale on survey was used to assess agreement with these statements? Or did the authors come up with the statements used for the survey? The language here could be more clear. If the point is just that the score on the survey of these states was higher than three, the language would be better as “Students agreed that the following were strengths of…” something like that. If this was a focus group coming up with strengths/weaknesses, this should be pointed out. - The portions of the manuscript describing the specifics of how students were able to go to labs and clinical clerkships are of interest, but I think the analysis of surveys and academic performance are interesting as they give some data on how things went. I would emphasize these areas and tighten up the data as above. - Authors should discuss the limitations of their study in the discussion. ********** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes: Timothy Vreeland [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. |
Revision 1 |
How medical education survives and evolves during COVID-19: our experience and future direction PONE-D-20-26059R1 Dear Dr. Myung, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Cesario Bianchi Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Dear Myung: Thank you for carefully revise your manuscript in line with the reviewer comments. I find your manuscript acceptable for publication. Congratulations. Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ********** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed. The authors have done a thorough job of examining and explaining their data. ********** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #2: Yes: Timothy J Vreeland, MD |
Formally Accepted |
PONE-D-20-26059R1 How medical education survives and evolves during COVID-19: our experience and future direction Dear Dr. Myung: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Cesario Bianchi Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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