Identification of skill in an online game: The case of Fantasy Premier League

Joseph D. O’Brien; James P. Gleeson; David J. P. O’Sullivan

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0246698

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionOctober 15, 2020
13 Jan 2021 Decision Letter - Anthony C Constantinou, Editor PONE-D-20-32476 Identification of skill in an online game: The case of Fantasy Premier League PLOS ONE Dear Dr. O'Brien, 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. We have received just one review. Because I agree with Reviewer #1 in that this is a well-written paper that requires minor revision before it can be accepted for publication, I decided not to further delay the peer-review process. If you decide to resubmit a revised version, please provide point-to-point responses to each of the comments raised by the reviewer. Please submit your revised manuscript by Feb 27 2021 11:59PM. 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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 ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 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 ****** 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 ****** 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: Very well written paper. I only have minor recommendations, so I recommended publish. First their statistical performances. It is unclear whether you are talking about players or managers in fantasy. Besides reference 28. A study performed by Easton and Newell in the Journal of Sports Analytics showed that chance doesn't win daily fantasy sports and should be added. Remove the here before introduce in the second paragraph. The sentence that starts In section IIC3... You may want to add a comment as to why. That is a player plays in more games for the week and thus will earn more points than if the player played in fewer games that week. You should state the claim better than I did though. With these structures in place.... You comment on hierarchial clustering. I would be more specific. In the details you comment about elbow method and K-means. I would bring these methods into the main body of the paper in all instances. The readers must know the tools you used. Then you can point them to more details in the supplementary sections. Nice job ****** 6. 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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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246698.r001
Revision 1
19 Jan 2021 Author Response Dear Prof. Constantinou, We thank you and the reviewer for the careful reviews and the positive and constructive comments on our manuscript. We hope that the revised manuscript, with changes in blue text, will be considered worthy of publication in the PLOS ONE. Yours sincerely, Joseph O’Brien (on behalf of all authors). Reviewer #1: Very well written paper. I only have minor recommendations, so I recommended publish. We thank the Reviewer for their extremely positive feedback on our manuscript and recommendation for publication. The reviewer highlights areas in which the clarity of the text could be enhanced: A number of textual edits have been implemented throughout and these changes have resulted in the clarity of the work being considerably improved. First their statistical performances. It is unclear whether you are talking about players or managers in fantasy. We appreciate that there may be some confusion due to the managers ‘playing’ the game which itself is based on the performance of football players. A statement is now included in the introduction which specifically sets out our aim of a statistical analysis of manager performance (rather than players) and we feel this should set the reader on a clearer track for the remainder of the manuscript. Besides reference 28. A study performed by Easton and Newell in the Journal of Sports Analytics showed that chance doesn't win daily fantasy sports and should be added. We thank the reviewer for pointing out this reference to us and it has now been included in conjunction with reference 28 to highlight the emerging research into fantasy sports that shows these games involve considerable levels of skill. Remove the here before introduce in the second paragraph. Implemented as requested. The sentence that starts In section IIC3... You may want to add a comment as to why. That is a player plays in more games for the week and thus will earn more points than if the player played in fewer games that week. You should state the claim better than I did though. We agree with the reviewer that examples of how managers may take advantage of these players appearing multiple times would help the reader and a commentary has been included in the revised manuscript. With these structures in place.... You comment on hierarchical clustering. I would be more specific. In the details you comment about elbow method and K-means. I would bring these methods into the main body of the paper in all instances. The readers must know the tools you used. Then you can point them to more details in the supplementary sections. We agree with the reviewer that further commentary on the clustering approaches used in our analysis would help the reader. As such the choice of k-means and the identification of the number of clusters via the elbow method is now explicitly mentioned in Section 3D, and furthermore we now provide more detailed commentary on the approach in the main text rather than in supplemental material (Sec 4D). Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246698.r002
25 Jan 2021 Decision Letter - Anthony C Constantinou, Editor Identification of skill in an online game: The case of Fantasy Premier League PONE-D-20-32476R1 Dear Dr. O'Brien, 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, Anthony C Constantinou Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246698.r003
Formally Accepted
8 Feb 2021 Acceptance Letter - Anthony C Constantinou, Editor PONE-D-20-32476R1 Identification of skill in an online game: The case of Fantasy Premier League Dear Dr. O'Brien: 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. Anthony C Constantinou Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246698.r004

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