Peer Review History
Original SubmissionAugust 3, 2021 |
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PONE-D-21-25133Mind the gender gap: COVID-19 lockdown effects on gender differences in preprint submissionsPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Ucar, 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 Nov 06 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. 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:
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Kind regards, Alireza Abbasi 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 Additional Editor Comments (if provided): Below are two reviews of your submission. Each reviewer raises important issues and concerns but each also sees potential. We invite you to resubmit a revissied version addressing the issues raised carefully. Good luck on the revision. [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: I Don't Know 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: 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: The paper analyses preprint submission to five major preprint services from 2017 to the early stages of lockdown in 2020 to find out if the pandemic had any impact on submission by female authors. The paper is timely and has interesting findings. The data set is large and seems to have been processed properly to deal with known issues in bibliographic data and gender identification. The authors have made the data available which is commendable. I have a few comments and questions. My first question is about the dates chosen. I think May was the early stages of lockdown in 2020 and not sure why a later date wasn't chosen to allow enough time for the pandemic to have its impact on scholarly work. Some of the gender bibliometric studies (see works by Mike Thelwall for instance) have used data such as US census or social security data for gender identification arguing other data are based on the social web and therefore, unreliable and usually lack transparency. does this issue apply to Genderize service, or it is a transparent and reliable source. The paper hasn't covered the related literature properly. while I didn't expect to see coverage of all gender bibliometric studies as there are many of them, the relevant papers that had a similar topic (impact of the pandemic on scientific productivity) should've been consulted and used if useful in the paper. An easy way to find most of such studies is to look at the papers that have cited the key paper by Viglione. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=15300145317525011924&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en Finally, I think at least the Zenodo (or a link) should be mentioned in reference 20 otherwise readers won't be able to locate the source. currently, it is just author names and the title. Reviewer #2: The manuscripts looks the disparity of productivity across males and females researcher by analysing a sample of nearly 500,000 preprints deposited during the years 2017 and 2020. Language of the paper is at certain places very speculative. For example, predicting that the gender gap is going to persist for decades. How do we know that it is going to persist for decades? What is our indication and how many decades are we talking about? Could it be for the next 8-10 decades? Could this vanish over the next few decades? This is currently very vague and rather speculative. There are other examples of speculative arguments in the introduction too, and I am not very comfortable with them, because I can’t neither confirm or challenge those statements. Language of the paper has at certain places been made unnecessarily complicated. In the sample, there were perhaps more 2020 papers with male authors than female authors. It is unclear why this has to be presented in a probabilistic language: “men were slightly more likely than women to submit preprints during lockdown”. Also being “slightly more likely” is not consistent with the sentence before claiming that the gap has widened during 2020. It is important that authors look at these findings with neutrality and not predisposed with the idea that the gender disparity has to have worsened during pandemic. “men were significantly more likely than women to submit COVID-related research” – How is this related to overall productivity of male and female researchers? Why Covid topic has been singled out as a measure of productivity? The reviewer also notes that more than 3 million articles are overall published each year, whereas the sample used in this study uses 500,000 pre-print items distributed over four years. While there is no prohibitive issue with sampling from pre-prints in general, one should note that they are not necessarily representative of the overall research production. The issue especially becomes important when the difference found between male and female is slight and can change after considering a bigger picture (i.e., the full amount of research produced) or published papers. Also, we cannot ignore the fact that these are pre-prints after all, and it is not clear what portion of them translated to official publications. This is especially a concern for covid-related publications in 2020 where an avalanche of papers were deposited in mass during first months of pandemic and many of them never got accepted due to insufficient quality/rigor. For what portion of articles, the gender for all authors (or at least first author) could be determined at the specified threshold of confidence (0.95) and criteria (full names and not initials)? p. 4 “However, this approach takes the averages of the individual-level variables, discarding valuable within-group information that may reveal opposing trends.” Please clarify. What does this mean? Are we talking about the interaction between contributing variables but in a rather complicated language? If the function in Eq 1 is a logit model, then why the distribution of error is normal? That is not consistent with a logit model specification. Why is p the proportion of males? The data is coming from individual articles. So what one would expect is for example p=1 if the paper has a male author (or a male first author, depending on what analysis you’re running). This is not aggregate model, so what is the reason for using the term proportion? The most confusing part of this equation is the alpha coefficients, which have not even been elaborated on. Why such a confusing specification? What is the reason for the additional error terms for alphas? Those are going to confound with the main error term and the reviewer cannot even see the justification or interpretation of those. Also this analysis (the logit analysis) is less problematic when we consider first authorships because a paper either has a male first author or a female first author (which is binary and consistent with a logit model specification). Therefore, if the coefficient for “year” for example is negative then one can conclude that the proportion of male authors have been decreasing over time (Although I am still not convinced why this has to be inferred from such an indirect complicated way as opposed to just reporting the proportion from the sample). But when it comes to “all author” analysis, then I am not sure how the models treats this. Is this where the issue of “proportion” comes to play? You count the proportion of male authors on the paper? Are you only using the papers for which the gender of all authors could be determined with 0.95 confidence? Again, considering that the issue of lockdown was not a thing until 2020, I do not see the point of doing such joint/multivariate analysis, whereas, the proportion of males/females that published in 2020 could have just been reported independently. I apologise if this comment might sound too direct, but could it be that authors had to force themselves to use a more sophisticated statistical approach because simple reporting of proportions/stats could have come across rudimentary? Again, I apologise and I am sure that authors understand that the nature of a review sometimes entails direct questions of this nature. There is just limited interaction between these variables especially for 2017-2019 and that makes the use of such joint model very questionable to the reviewer. So could you justify the use of this method (and not choosing to just simply report the split of authorship in 2020 pre-prints)? Does it have to be inferred indirectly from a multivariate probabilistic model? In the absence of captions for Supplementary figures, the reviewer unfortunately has no idea how to interpret them. ********** 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: Yes: Hamid R. Jamali 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. |
Revision 1 |
PONE-D-21-25133R1Mind the gender gap: COVID-19 lockdown effects on gender differences in preprint submissionsPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Ucar, 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 Mar 19 2022 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 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: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Alireza Abbasi Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: 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. 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 ********** 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 ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: I Don't Know ********** 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 ********** 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 ********** 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: The authors have provided detailed responses to reviewers' comments and have made appropriate amendments. The only thing that was not clear to me in the revised format was whether the change in the number of preprints (changes in data presented in table 1) resulted in any change in the results of the regression analysis. I see they are the same as before while the number of preprints has changed. I just want the authors to ensure that there hasn't been an oversight in relation to this and the results are not erroneous. ********** 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: Hamid R. Jamali [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 2 |
Mind the gender gap: COVID-19 lockdown effects on gender differences in preprint submissions PONE-D-21-25133R2 Dear Dr. Ucar, 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, Ali B. Mahmoud, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): 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 #1: 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 ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: 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 ********** 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 ********** 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: Happy with the response of the authors about the accuracy of their analysis. The manuscript is ok for publishing. ********** 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: Hamid R. Jamali |
Formally Accepted |
PONE-D-21-25133R2 Mind the gender gap: COVID-19 lockdown effects on gender differences in preprint submissions Dear Dr. Ucar: 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. Ali B. Mahmoud Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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