Relative age effect? No “flipping” way! Apparatus dependent inverse relative age effects in elite, women’s artistic gymnastics

Eleanor Langham-Walsh; Victoria Gottwald; James Hardy

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0253656

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionFebruary 2, 2021
9 Apr 2021 Decision Letter - Caroline Sunderland, Editor PONE-D-21-03611 Relative age effect? No “flipping” way! Nuanced evidence of an apparatus dependent inverse relative age effect in elite, women’s artistic gymnastics PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Langham-Walsh, 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 respond to the reviewers comments in a point by point manner. Please submit your revised manuscript by May 24 2021 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. 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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 review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [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: 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: Yes Reviewer #2: 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 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: GENERAL REMARKS: - Please instead R2 use R superscript 2 - Index of discrimination must be consinstently noted in manuscript (compare with line 142) TITLE: Please be less dramatic KEY WORDS: instead self-fulfilling prophecy – use some other key word ABSTRACT: do not use bracet-space-text but bracet-text way of writing. Be consistent INTRODUCTION: - line 71 – add RAE study conducted on male olympian gymnasts (Delaš Kalinski, S., Jelaska, I., & Knežević, N. (2017). Age effects among elite male gymnasts. Acta Kinesiologica, 11(2), 84 – 89. METHODS: - line 136 – in formula y = e(b0+b1x) ...0 and 1 must be written in subscript and remove bracet from formula - line 138 correct right bracet Reviewer #2: My comments: 1) page 2, line 41, missing reference. 2) page 2 , line 43. When? Always or under which conditions? Explain RAE more thoroughly. 3) page 3, line 51-60, is or should be covered in the discussion part. 4) page 3, line 62, please explain the term inter-sport differences or rephrase the sentence. 5) page3, line 64, you make a statement of there being a bias towards delayed-maturation for success but you only seem to base that on the absence of RAE. You mention a finding of reversed RAE first in next paragraph, seems odd. 6) page 3, line 69-71, speculation, does not belong in the introduction. 7) page 4, line 75, if you don’t explain the term “Q2 gymnast” I will assume that you mean gymnast being born in the second quarter of a calendar year since this article covers the subject of relative age effect. This contradicts there being a bias toward being born late in the calendar year. What are you saying? 8) page 4, line 76, Explain “donor sport” and why this would explain the overrepresentation of gymnast being born in the second quarter in the calendar year, 9) page 4, line 90-91, What do you mean with Q1 resp Q4 effect? 10) page 5, line 98-101, Pure speculation, doesn’t fit the context. 11) page 6, line 118, maybe change “present day” to “time of writing”. 12) page 6, line 122, in my opinion, you have to include a table or some sort of description of which countries where represented and to which extent. 13) page 6, line 126, When did you obtain birth dates from Wikipedia and which one did you use (my guess is standard English Wikipedia). 14) page 6, line 130, scratch “cutting edge”. 15) page 6, line 130, just “recent” 17) page6, under Analysis just keep what describes what you did in your analysis and scratch the rest. 18) page 6, line 136, Time of birth? Time of the day??? Be more precise what you mean. 19) page 6, line 137, What competitive year? 20) page6, line 136, to me your formula doesn’t make sense. E^(b0+b1x) cant equal a birth frequency per week, have you confused frequency with rate? 21) page 7, line 149, what is middle of the year? 22) page9, line 11 and 16, no confidence interval? 23) page9, line 12 and 17, start and end of what, what is the respective definition? 24) page10, line 3-5, Belongs to introduction. 25) page 11, line 19, source? and please explain how this differs from any other sport. 26) page 12, line 11, too much speculation. 1. When did we establish that younger gymnast experience enhanced performance expectations? 2. What suggests that that younger gymnasts possess a greater psychological advantage? 3. Even if both 1 and 2 are true McKays findings doesn’t explain how they would correlate. 27) Page 12, line 13, why would the galtea effect explain that more gymnasts practicing beam or vault are born later in the calendar year? Explain. 28) Page 12 and 13, line 22-18, this is pretty much insubstantial speculation. The conclusion from more elite gymnasts being born late in calendar to that “it is important to develop a strong technical foundation, regardless of a gymnast’s physical attributes, to enable them to succeed at the higher levels”, is far-fetched. What would the implication be if it was the opposite finding with more elite level gymnast being born early? 29) page 14, line 4, Again with the Q2 athletes. What are they? ****** 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:** Staffan Ek [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.0253656.r001
Revision 1
17 May 2021 Author Response PLOS One: Reviewer Comments 10.05.21 Relative age effect? No “flipping” way! Inverse relative age effects in elite, women’s artistic gymnastics Our references to page and line numbers correspond with the revised manuscript with tracked changes. Comments from the reviewers: Reviewer 1: General Remarks: 1) Please instead of R2 use R superscript 2. Perhaps this may be a formatting issue when the document has been sent to reviewers, but we have completed a thorough search and to our knowledge, all R2 are reported using superscript. Please do highlight to us any that are not, and we will make the necessary changes. 2) Index of discrimination must be consistently noted in manuscript (compare with line 142). As with the above comment, to our knowledge index of discrimination is noted consistently throughout the document. Please do highlight to us any that are not, and we will edit accordingly. Title: 1) Please be less dramatic. Whilst we can appreciate the reviewer’s concern over the unorthodox nature of the title, we would be keen to keep this based on how well it has been received when presenting at both national and international conferences. However, if the associate editor also feels it a little strong, we will happily change our position and amend as necessary. This comment has encouraged us to reflect further on the title, which has resulted in a more concise revised title (page 1 line 1). Key Words: 1) Instead self-fulfilling prophecy – use some other keyword. We are happy to amend this keyword as long as this option is provided to us when submitting our responses to reviewer comments. We have removed self-fulfilling prophecy and included Pygmalion effects and Galatea effects instead. Introduction: 1) Line 71 – add RAE study conducted on male Olympian gymnasts (Delaš Kalinski, S., Jelaska, I., & Knežević, N. (2017). Age effects among elite male gymnasts. Acta Kinesiologica, 11(2), 84 – 89. Thank you for highlighting this paper to us. We have now included this within our introduction (page 4 line 74). We have also amended a sentence in our discussion to account for this (page 15 line 23). Methods: 1) Line 136 – in formula y = e(b0+b1x) ...0 and 1 must be written in subscript and remove bracket from formula. Thank you we have now amended this in line with your recommendations (page 7 line 150). 2) Line 138 correct right bracket. This has now been amended (page 7 line 153). Reviewer 2: 1) Page 2, line 41, missing reference. This has now been amended (page 2 line 41). 2) Page 2, line 43. When? Always or under which conditions? Explain RAE more thoroughly. Thank you for your comment. We have inserted additional information which explains the relative age effect more thoroughly (page 2 line 43 – page 3 line 48). We have still kept this relatively brief to avoid repetition of a later section of the introduction, discussing the influence of difference conditions upon the relative age effect (page 3 line 67 – page 5 line 109). 3) Page 3, line 51-60, is or should be covered in the discussion part. We felt that including a brief overview of the bio-psycho-social mechanisms underpinning the RAE, and therefore advancing beyond biological maturation alone, was important to the overall narrative of the manuscript. However, we are in agreement that this mechanistic literature also warrants addressing substantially within the discussion section. More specifically, we go on to discuss self-fulfilling prophecy in the discussion with specific reference to our results (page 13 line 4 – 23) and have incorporated further evidence supporting self-fulfilling prophecy as a mechanism for our findings (page 13 line 15 – 21). 4) Page 3, line 62, please explain the term inter-sport differences or rephrase the sentence. Thank you for this comment. We have provided an explanation for both inter-sport (page 3 line 67) and intra-sport (page 4 line 93) differences to enhance clarity for the reader. 5) Page 3, line 64, you make a statement of there being a bias towards delayed maturation for success, but you only seem to base that on the absence of the RAE. You mention a finding of reversed RAE first in the next paragraph, seems odd. Thank you for your feedback we have combined these paragraphs and made amendments to enhance the clarity, specifically identifying why there may have been a shift in the RAE across the identified age groups (page 3, line 67 – page 4 line 82) from a null distribution to a Q4 overrepresentation. We elaborate on the combined influence of delayed maturation alongside cognitive maturity. 6) Page 3, line 67 – 71 speculation, does not belong in the introduction. We have reworded the manuscript to enhance the clarity of where this speculation comes from (page 4, line 75). 7) Page 4, line 75, if you don’t explain the term “Q2 gymnast” I will assume that you mean gymnast being born in the second quarter of a calendar year since this article covers the subject of relative age effect. This contradicts there being a bias toward being born late in the calendar year. What are you saying? Thank you for your comment. On reflection, we have made the decision to remove the section on Q2 gymnasts and donor sports (Page 4, line 83 - 91) as we agree that it is contradictory to other information presented in the manuscript and may lead to confusion. 8) Page 4, line 76, Explain “donor sport” and why this would explain the overrepresentation of gymnast being born in the second quarter in the calendar year. Please see above comment. 9) Page 4, line 90-91, What do you mean with Q1 resp Q4 effect? We can appreciate a lack of clarity regarding the terminology used here and have subsequently elaborated on this to explain that a Q1 effect is a greater distribution of athletes born in the first quarter of the year and a Q4 effect a greater distribution of those born in the last quarter of the year (Page 5, line 100 – 103). 10) Page 5, line 98-101, Pure speculation, doesn’t fit the context. We have removed this from the introduction (page 5 line 110 - 113). 11) Page 6, line 118, maybe change “present day” to “time of writing”. We have amended this in line with the above recommendation (Page 6, line 132). 12) Page 6, line 122, in my opinion, you have to include a table or some sort of description of which countries where represented and to which extent.” We have included a table summarising the representation of each country and attached as supporting information (Page 6, line 136-137). 13) Page 6, line 126, When did you obtain birth dates from Wikipedia and which one did you use (my guess is standard English Wikipedia). Yes, this is correct, and this has now been amended within the manuscript (Page 6, line 141). 14) Page 6, line 130, scratch “cutting edge”. This wording has now been removed (Page 7, line 145). 15) Page 6, line 130, just “recent”. This has now been amended (Page 7, line 145). 16) Page 6, under Analysis just keep what describes what you did in your analysis and scratch the rest. Thank you – we have now amended this section to remove any superfluous information and just describe what we did. 17) Page 6, line 136, Time of birth? Time of the day??? Be more precise what you mean. We have added additional information to this to make this more precise (Page 7, line 152-154). 18) Page 6, line 137, What competitive year? We have amended this so that a more precise definition is now offered to explain when the year runs from (Page 7, line 152). 19) Page 6, line 136, to me your formula doesn’t make sense. E^(b0+b1x) can’t equal a birth frequency per week, have you confused frequency with rate? We have taken this analytical strategy from Doyle and Bottomley (2018) who also use frequency of birth per week, however based upon your comments we have amended this to rate (Page 7, line 150 & 153). 20) Page 7, line 149, what is middle of the year? We have rephrased this as across the year to avoid ambiguity and be more in line with the continuous nature of the data (Page 8, line 166 & 174). 21) Page 9, line 11 and 16, no confidence interval? We have amended this to include confidence intervals (Page 10, line 11 & 17). 22) Page 9, line 12 and 17, start and end of what, what is the respective definition? We have amended this to provide the respective definitions (Page 10, line 13 & 19). 23) Page 10, line 3-5, Belongs to introduction. We have moved this to the introduction (Page 5, line 116-118). 24) Page 11, line 19, source? and please explain how this differs from any other sport. Thank you for your comment. We have chosen to delete this section from our discussion as we did not feel that it added any additional value to our findings (page 12 line 19 – page 13 line 3). 25) Page 12, line 11, too much speculation. 1. When did we establish that younger gymnast experience enhanced performance expectations? 2. What suggests that that younger gymnasts possess a greater psychological advantage? 3. Even if both 1 and 2 are true McKays findings doesn’t explain how they would correlate. Thank you for your comment. Although we acknowledge that this is a little speculative, a limitation of a large proportion of RAE literature, we would argue that previous research surrounding self-fulfilling prophecy and coach expectations supports our findings. To address this comment, we have added in a sentence acknowledging the speculative nature of our conclusions (page 13 line 3 & 4), whilst also including additional research supporting Pygmalion effects (page 13 line 15-18). We are also in agreement with your comment about McKay’s findings and have subsequently removed this (page 13 line 13 - 15). 26) Page 12, line 13, why would the galtea effect explain that more gymnasts practicing beam or vault are born later in the calendar year? Explain. Thank you for your feedback. As relatively younger gymnasts are likely to be relatively smaller, it stands to reason that coaches will place an expectation that these gymnasts will not perform well on events requiring speed and power (e.g. vault). However, with most gymnasts competing on all four apparatus, this poor performance can be offset by performance on other apparatus (e.g. beam) where size is less likely to have an influence. Because of this, coaches may invest more resources into these younger gymnasts’ development on beam leading to stronger performance. Following this, the gymnast influenced by their coach’s expectations would believe that they have the potential to perform well on this event and subsequently spend more time practicing (Galatea effects). Future research may wish to pursue this further. We do not feel that Galatea effects provide an explanation for our vault findings and have instead used the underdog hypothesis as an explanation for these findings (page 14 line 6 – page 15 line 13). We have added an additional sentence and reference to enhance the clarity of our discussion and provide a stronger explanation for why Galatea effects would result in greater practice on beam (page 13 line 19-21). Following removal of McKay’s findings from the previous paragraph, we have also combined the paragraphs examining the Pygmalion and Galatea effects which should strengthen the evidence of the link between these two effects. We have removed the discussion point regarding self-efficacy as we feel that it confused the point we were trying to make and did not add enough value to warrant its inclusion (page 13 line 24 – page 14 line 3). 27) Page 12 and 13, line 22-18, this is pretty much insubstantial speculation. The conclusion from more elite gymnasts being born late in calendar to that “it is important to develop a strong technical foundation, regardless of a gymnast’s physical attributes, to enable them to succeed at the higher levels”, is far-fetched. What would the implication be if it was the opposite finding with more elite level gymnast being born early? Thank you for your comment. We agree that there is a somewhat speculative nature to our conclusion as like many RAE studies. However, with research emphasising the importance of technical development for vault success (Bradshaw 2014), we think that it is important to highlight this as a possible mechanism behind our findings. We have amended the paragraph to acknowledge that our findings may be speculative (page 14 line 16), whilst also providing additional clarity for why these results may have occurred (page 14 line 16 – 19 & page 15 line 5 - 8). With regards to our implications, we have added additional depth in line the with the above amendments (page 15 line 10 – 13). 28) Page 14, line 4, Again with the Q2 athletes. What are they? We have amended this to provide explanation for Q2 athletes (page 15 line 24). Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253656.r002
10 Jun 2021 Decision Letter - Caroline Sunderland, Editor Relative age effect? No “flipping” way! Apparatus dependent inverse relative age effects in elite, women’s artistic gymnastics PONE-D-21-03611R1 Dear Dr. Langham-Walsh, 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. 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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 #1: All comments have been addressed 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 #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes 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 #1: Yes 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 #1: Yes 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 #1: All suggestions and remarks of the reviewers were adopted, and quality and clarity of the paper is further achieved. As a reviewer, I have no further objections to the new version of the paper. Reviewer #2: The authors have made a great effort to improve the article with the comments that the reviewers have presented. ****** 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 #1: Yes: Sunčica Delaš Kalinski Reviewer #2: Yes:** Staffan Ek https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253656.r003
Formally Accepted
18 Jun 2021 Acceptance Letter - Caroline Sunderland, Editor PONE-D-21-03611R1 Relative age effect? No “flipping” way! Apparatus dependent inverse relative age effects in elite, women’s artistic gymnastics Dear Dr. Langham-Walsh: 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. Caroline Sunderland Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253656.r004

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