Post-consumer food waste generation while dining out: A close-up view

Myra Zeineddine; Samer Kharroubi; Ali Chalak; Hussein Hassan; Mohamad G. Abiad

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0251947

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMarch 10, 2021
7 Apr 2021 Decision Letter - László VASA, Editor PONE-D-21-07906 Post-Consumer Food Waste Generation while Dining Out: A Close-up View PLOS ONE Dear Dr. MOHAMAD G. ABIAD, 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. Please submit your revised manuscript by 09.04.2021. 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. 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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: Partly Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: I Don't Know ****** 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: No 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 paper investigates the very actual problem of food waste generation. Tha authors used the appropriate methodological toolset, performed the research well and the conclusions are right. However, the literature review is missing from the articel, a separate chapter should be created for it and also more souces should be reviewed. Reviewer #2: The study presented in this article is of outstanding scientific and practical importance. The authors did significant background work. Data collection and processing required tremendous work. I see a shortcoming in the description of the chosen statistical method. Why was the Tobit model chosen? What are the advantages and disadvantages compared to other methods? Eg.: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/gsj.1363 I think it’s conceivable that this is the best choice, but you should justify why. Without knowing the basic data, I cannot judge the quality of statistical analysis. It is a less important issue, but the figures should be re-edited. It would be worthwhile to think about what should be shown in a figure and what can be clearly seen in a table. ****** 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: No [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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251947.r001
Revision 1
3 May 2021 Author Response PONE-D-21-07906 Post-Consumer Food Waste Generation while Dining Out: A Close-up View PLOS ONE Dear Dr. László VASA, Thank you very much for sending us the reviews of our manuscript. We mostly agree with the reviewers' observations and tried to address the comments and concerns detailed below. However, sharing our data on an open platform is restricted by University IRB guidelines and regulations. Data will be shared upon request due to University IRB requirements. Access to data requires the signature of an NDA. Please contact irb@aub.edu.lb and the corresponding author at ma192@aub.edu.lb. The authors did not have special access privileges that others would not have when accessing the data except that the data will not have any identifiers (i.e., any link to the subjects). On another note, on behalf of the authors, I declare that no competing interests exist. We want to thank the reviewers for raising questions whose answers improved the quality of our manuscript. Please find here below our responses to the reviewers' comments/suggestions. Best regards, Mohamad Abiad Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, please 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 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. Please provide additional details regarding participant consent. In the ethics statement in the Methods and online submission information, please ensure that you have specified what type you obtained (for instance, written or verbal, and if verbal, how it was documented and witnessed). The consent was written. We have edited the text in the revised manuscript. Once you have amended this statement in the Methods section of the manuscript, please add the same text to the "Ethics Statement" field of the submission form (via "Edit Submission"). 3. 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 more 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 sensitive information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) 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. 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. This has been addressed in the cover letter. Data will be shared upon request due to University IRB requirements. Access to data requires the signature of an NDA. Please contact irb@aub.edu.lb and the corresponding Author at ma192@aub.edu.lb. The authors did not have special access privileges that others would not have when accessing the data except that the data will not have any identifiers (i.e., any link to the subjects). 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: Partly Reviewer #2: Yes We thank the reviewers for their feedback. 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: I Don't Know We believe that we have run rigorous statistical analysis on the collected data. 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: No Reviewer #2: No we have highlighted the reason why the data has not been made available. Data will be shared upon request due to University IRB requirements. Access to data requires the signature of an NDA. Please contact irb@aub.edu.lb and the corresponding Author at ma192@aub.edu.lb. The authors did not have special access privileges that others would not have when accessing the data except that the data will not have any identifiers (i.e., any link to the subjects). 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 We thank the authors for their positive feedback. Reviewer #1: The paper investigates the very actual problem of food waste generation. The authors used the appropriate methodological toolset, performed the research well, and the conclusions are right. However, the literature review is missing from the article, a separate chapter should be created for it, and more sources should be reviewed. We thank the reviewer for his suggestion, but we disagree that more sources need to be reviewed. We believe we have done a rigorous search and included all relevant literature on the subject. The second reviewer acknowledges this "the authors did significant background work." Reviewer #2: The study presented in this article is of outstanding scientific and practical importance. The authors did significant background work. Data collection and processing required tremendous work. I see a shortcoming in the description of the chosen statistical method. Why was the Tobit model chosen? What are the advantages and disadvantages compared to other methods? Eg.: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/gsj.1363 I think it's conceivable that this is the best choice, but you should justify why. The Tobit model is usually used to estimate linear relationships between variables when there is either left- or right-censoring in the dependent variable. In our case, the dependent variable is assumed to follow a mixed distribution where there is a probability mass at zero and a continuous distribution for values greater than zero. The zeros and the non‐zero values thus come from the same data generating process (a data set typically called corner solution). The nature of such dependent variable makes ordinary least squares (OLS, henceforth) potentially unsuitable, and Tobit models may constitute a valid estimation approach. Without knowing the basic data, I cannot judge the quality of statistical analysis. It is a less important issue, but the figures should be re-edited. It would be worthwhile to think about what should be shown in a figure and what can be clearly seen in a table. We thank the reviewer. We have included the data explanation in text. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251947.r002
6 May 2021 Decision Letter - László VASA, Editor Post-Consumer Food Waste Generation while Dining Out: A Close-up View PONE-D-21-07906R1 Dear Dr. MOHAMAD G. ABIAD, 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, László VASA, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251947.r003
Formally Accepted
12 May 2021 Acceptance Letter - László VASA, Editor PONE-D-21-07906R1 Post-Consumer Food Waste Generation while Dining Out: A Close-up View Dear Dr. Abiad: 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 Prof. Dr. László VASA Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251947.r004

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