PONE-D-20-35335

Health and science-related misinformation on COVID-19. A content analysis of hoaxes identified by fact checkers in Spain

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. León,

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.

I am writing to let you know that your Manuscript ID PONE-D-20-35335 entitled " Health and science-related misinformation on COVID-19. A content analysis of hoaxes identified by fact checkers in Spain" which you submitted to Plos One has now been reviewed.  The comments of the reviewers are included at the bottom of this letter.

Please note that the reviewers have recommended major revisions to your manuscript, which I believe will result in an improved manuscript overall. Particularly, I suggest you attend to clarifying research goals based on a more solid and wide literature review. Therefore, I invite you to revise your manuscript, in conjunction with the comments of the reviewers.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 23 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:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled '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,

Chang Sup Park, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments:

I am writing to let you know that your Manuscript ID PONE-D-20-35335 entitled " Health and science-related misinformation on COVID-19. A content analysis of hoaxes identified by fact checkers in Spain" which you submitted to Plos One has now been reviewed. The comments of the reviewers are included at the bottom of this letter.

Please note that the reviewers have recommended major revisions to your manuscript, which I believe will result in an improved manuscript overall. Particularly, I suggest you attend to clarifying research goals based on a more solid and wide literature review. Therefore, I invite you to revise your manuscript, in conjunction with the comments of the reviewers.

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

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. We suggest you thoroughly copyedit your manuscript for language usage, spelling, and grammar. If you do not know anyone who can help you do this, you may wish to consider employing a professional scientific editing service.  

Whilst you may use any professional scientific editing service of your choice, PLOS has partnered with both American Journal Experts (AJE) and Editage to provide discounted services to PLOS authors. Both organizations have experience helping authors meet PLOS guidelines and can provide language editing, translation, manuscript formatting, and figure formatting to ensure your manuscript meets our submission guidelines. To take advantage of our partnership with AJE, visit the AJE website (http://learn.aje.com/plos/) for a 15% discount off AJE services. To take advantage of our partnership with Editage, visit the Editage website (www.editage.com) and enter referral code PLOSEDIT for a 15% discount off Editage services.  If the PLOS editorial team finds any language issues in text that either AJE or Editage has edited, the service provider will re-edit the text for free.

Upon resubmission, please provide the following:

• The name of the colleague or the details of the professional service that edited your manuscript
• A copy of your manuscript showing your changes by either highlighting them or using track changes (uploaded as a *supporting information* file)
• A clean copy of the edited manuscript (uploaded as the new *manuscript* file)

3. Please include additional information regarding the data extraction tool used in the study and ensure that you have provided sufficient details that others could replicate the analyses. For instance, if you developed a data extraction tool as part of this study and it is not under a copyright more restrictive than CC-BY, please include a copy, in both the original language and English, as Supporting Information, or include a citation if it has been published previously.

4. During the internal evaluation of your manuscript. We note that the current article addresses a similar research question with some overlap in the study variables of a  previous publication:  http://profesionaldelainformacion.com/contenidos/2020/may/salaverria-buslon-lopez-leon-lopez-erviti.pdf. In light of the related article, please cite and discuss the above mentioned related paper in the body of the manuscript (introduction, methods if overlap, and discussion). In particular, please discuss how your research contributes to the basis of academic knowledge in light of the above mentioned publication. Please bear in mind that our publication criteria state " If a submitted study replicates or is very similar to previous work, authors must provide a sound scientific rationale for the submitted work and clearly reference and discuss the existing literature. Submissions that replicate or are derivative of existing work will likely be rejected if authors do not provide adequate justification.

5. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide.

6. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information.

[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: Partly

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: 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: 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

**********

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 proposes a classification schema of articles evaluated by 3 Spanish fact checking organizations, dubbed "hoaxes" by the authors. The three-month period considered encompasses the first COVID-19 related lockdowns. The authors annotate the hoaxes for kind of media used, platform it appeared on, geographical scope, source type, and a hierarchical "type" classification. Out of 533 articles, authors consider 187 which are about "science and health", and for these, the paper provides tables of class memberships for the above annotations. The authors also provide content analysis, grouping the topics into "origin of the virus", "treatments", "vaccines", etc. They then present analysis using intersection between some of these variables, such as type of hoax vs. format, and type of hoax vs. geographical scope.

The paper suffers from a vague motivation, from the introduction, to the presentation of results, and conclusions. The Abstract, for instance, presents the results in "The "prototypical hoax"..." sentence as a hodge-podge of observations that are difficult to contextualize, and understand their importance. In the Introduction, the authors claim that the "characteristics of these hoaxes and the forms they take have not yet been brought to light", such as [1] concerning India, and I'm sure many more. Similarly, the related work section does not make a compelling case for performing this study. My point is not that observational studies are not important, but they need to be motivated by more than "nobody has done this before". If the classification system proposed here was aimed at a particular task, such as ways to intersect or detect misinformation, or particular theories about communication, the results may be easier to interpret and contextualize.

I commend the authors on coming up with a coding schema that resulted in a higher inter-annotator agreement, giving me confidence that the labels applied in this study are somehow valid.

The analysis presents some interesting insights. For instance, the fact that these hoaxes are often based on "decontextualization" and that this often happens around healthcare/scientific sources. In fact, the authors state several times that the pace of scientific publishing picked up so much that it's likely that even the publishers "were not able to process them properly". The authors provide several examples of poor-quality and retracted articles that made a splash on social media. It would be very interesting to see a systematic analysis of whether pre-publishing articles resulted in retraction and misinformation, instead of seeing this anecdotal evidence.

The fact that lots of these hoaxes were found on social media channels is emphasized by the authors as a major finding in the paper. However, this is largely affected by the article selection policy of the fact-checking websites used in this study. I am not sure about the Spanish mass media, but in the US (with which I am more familiar), plenty of falsehoods are promoted on the television and radio -- media which still have a huge audience, possibly in demographics only somewhat overlapping with that captured by the current study. I would recommend the authors contextualize their findings in this methodological limitation.

Another limitation is the paper's scope - Spain - making the insights highly localized. This is, of course, also a strength, providing points of view outside US-centric research that is so popular. However, the authors fail to really juxtapose their findings to those in other countries, or strongly contextualize the findings in the peculiarities of the Spanish COVID situation at the time. This is another area where the authors could strengthen the paper. For instance, a time visualization could provide readers insights into when most hoaxes happened, and with what major events they were associated. How the political situation may have differed from that of other countries, or influenced by outside political forces (such as Trump's push for hydroxychloroquine). From where the sources of information came (inside or outside Spain), etc.

The authors need to show statistical testing results when claiming comparison, such as on line 341, especially since the final number of documents examined (n) can shrink quite a bit. In the end, this is a sample of all potential misinformation out there -- if we are comparing, say, 5 to 6 documents, is the strength of this difference enough to claim it can be generalized?

Overall, the paper may present a few interesting insights, but is definitely not groundbreaking. It could be strengthened by motivating the labeling exercise by a particular task (say, automated hoax detection, or science decontextualization monitor), a particular theory (ex: pre-publishing scientific news results in misinformation), or emphasis on the peculiarity of the Spanish situation and its interaction with the ongoing events there and abroad. I believe considering the "why is this interesting" question by the authors may make this observational study much more interesting.

Small remarks:

Abstract - "importance of time" should be "importance of timing"?

[1] Akbar, Syeda Zainab, et al. "Misinformation as a Window into Prejudice: COVID-19 and the Information Environment in India." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 4.CSCW3 (2021): 1-28.

**********

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: Yelena Aleksandrovna Mejova

[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.

PONE-D-20-35335R1

Health and science-related misinformation on COVID-19. A content analysis of hoaxes identified by fact checkers in Spain

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. León,

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 reviewer points out that the statistical analysis has not been performed rigorously. Also please make clear conceptual distinctions among hoaxes, rumors, misinformation and fake news.

I look forward to receiving your revision.

==============================

Please submit your revised manuscript by Dec 03 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:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled '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. 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,

Chang Sup Park, Ph.D.

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.

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

The reviewer points out that the statistical analysis has not been performed rigorously. Also please make clear conceptual distinctions among hoaxes, rumors, misinformation and fake news.

I look forward to receiving your revision.

[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 #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: No

**********

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: This is an interesting paper on Spanish hoaxes on COVID-19, and I enjoy reading the result. There are some comments or suggestions for further improvement:

Overall comments:

1. The authors have tried to addressed all comments raised in a previous round of review .

the statistical analysis could be improved.

The result is descriptive and lacks knowledge discovery, it would be really nice if the author could consider more comparison or in-depth analysis.

Specific comments：

The statistical analysis has not been performed appropriately and rigorously. For example, for chi-square, which should be used to compare two variable, seems to be used to compare multiple variables at one time (or haven’t been reported properly) as shown in one example below (line 451-453), and p value should not be reported as “p-tail<0,05”:"A significant difference between formats was that audio clips were used more frequently in the case of exaggerations (20.0%) (Table 8) (chi-square= 45,494**; df=30 ; p-tail<0,05). "

The authors use content analysis with Codebook by two coders, there are 3 topics however, in result, only four types are listed, which doesn't match: Healthcare/science,Healthcare/science,Member of the public ,Business.（Table 11. Non-anonymous source types by hoax type.)

I would suggest this research to distinguish the difference between hoaxes, rumors, misinformation and fake news. There have been many studies on misinformation, rumors and fake news, so why choose hoaxes only? Comparison between hoaxes and misinformation and further analysis could be added to enhance the importance of the article.

In the introduction, the author claim to" establish a classification system that can be used to explain the narrative mechanisms that underpin the credibility of this information "(line. 58,59), however, instead of building up a system, this paper demostrates a descriptive analysis on one case only.

**********

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: 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.

PONE-D-20-35335R2Health and science-related misinformation on COVID-19. A content analysis of hoaxes identified by fact checkers in SpainPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. León,

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 conduct an extensive copy-editing and fix all the statistical errors based on the comments by the reviewer. 

Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 24 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:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled '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: 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,

Chang Sup Park, Ph.D.

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 #3: (No Response)

**********

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 #3: Partly

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #3: No

**********

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 #3: 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 #3: No

**********

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 #3: Work is required on copy-editing to bring the manuscript to publishable standard.

A number of minor statistical errors need to be corrected.

Please refer to detailed comments and suggestions in the Attached document. Thank you.

**********

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 #3: 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.

Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: Reviewers Comments. PONE-D-20-35335R2.docx

PONE-D-20-35335R3Health and science-related disinformation on COVID-19. A content analysis of hoaxes identified by fact checkers in SpainPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. León,

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 reviewer is satisfied with your work, but suggests some copy editing.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 21 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:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled '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: 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,

Chang Sup Park, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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.

Additional Editor Comments:

The reviewer is satisfied with your work, but suggests some copy editing.

[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 #3: (No Response)

**********

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 #3: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #3: 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 #3: 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 #3: No

**********

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 #3: PONE-D-20-35335R2

Health and science-related misinformation on COVID-19. A content analysis of hoaxes identified by fact checkers in Spain

REVIEWER’S COMMENTS

General Comments

Content

The authors are to be commended and thanked for addressing the suggestions and recommendations. The manuscript reads very well. I have no further comments regarding the content.

Well done to the authors on undertaking their thorough research and on preparing a very comprehensive, well-informed and timely manuscript on this important topic. The published article will be of interest to readers around the world!

Copy editing

The manuscript is ready for publication, following minor copy editing (points below) to be undertaken by the authors.

1. p.6, line 148: Delete the comma after ‘… COVID-19’

2. p.7, line 168: Add the word ‘current’, i.e. to read ‘The current research …’

3. p.8, line 188: Add the word ‘period’ immediately before ‘(March 11 to June …)

4. p.10, line 209: Split last word into two, i.e. to read ‘… intercoder reliability’

5. p.10, line 209: I don’t think there is a need for the word ‘and’ between ‘double’ and ‘blind’ as this is usually written simply as ‘double blind’

6. p.11, line 324: Remove comma and second full stop after ‘prominent’

7. Table 6: Place the label (descriptor) on the line above the table, consistent with all other tables.

8. p.19, lines 359-60: After the colon, replace the commas with semi-colons, i.e. to read ‘real; …. ; …. ‘ and …’

9. p.23, line 454: Use a capital ‘T’ for the correct title of The Lancet.

All Tables containing numbers:

10. Line up the ones under ones, tens under tens and hundreds under hundreds in all columns; and

11. Remove brackets in the footnotes to the tables, i.e. remove brackets surrounding * and **.

Tables containing words:

12. Adjust either width of some columns or size of font to ensure that words are not split incorrectly (e.g. across two lines) and that commas appear immediately after the relevant word.

---------------------------------------

**********

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 #3: 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.

Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: Reviewer 3. Final Comments and Recommendation. PONE-D-20-35335R2.docx

Health and science-related disinformation on COVID-19. A content analysis of hoaxes identified by fact checkers in Spain

PONE-D-20-35335R4

Dear Dr. León,

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,

Chang Sup Park, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: