PONE-D-22-14194Test-retest reliability and validity of the Importance of Olfaction questionaire in DenmarkPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Tchemerinsky Konieczny,

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.

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ACADEMIC EDITOR: Please also consider my comments and suggestions.==============================

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Sorana D. Bolboacă, Ph.D., M.Sc., M.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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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: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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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: No

Reviewer #3: Yes

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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

Reviewer #3: Yes

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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: Thanks for inviting me to review this manuscript. It’s good but there are some things to correct:

1. Introduction is too long… only 3 paragraphs are enough.

2. The section Method contains numerical information… these are results. You have to correct the entire section.

3. Why you didn’t use only the Danish questionnaires? And why you have a different time between the digital and analogue questionnaires?

4. It’s not clear for me why you compared your results only with Croy and colab.? It’s a little bit unusual to see such analysis… there are a lot of studies performed by Prof. Hummel and his team…

5. The Danish version of IO-Q seems to be reliable, but something like a meta-analysis to compare your results seems to be more appropriate.

Reviewer #2: The authors set out to test and retest the reliability and validity of the Danish translation of the previously developed importance of olfaction questionnaire (IO-Q). They present in detail the IO-Q and its component sub-scales.

The IO-Q was tested and retested on a consistent sample of n=179. However, the authors do not present the recruitment strategy, nor if respondents were compensated in any way for taking part in the study.

Importantly, researchers dropped the data collected from a respondent that did not follow the procedure, as well as outlier data from respondents who completed the analogue Danish questionnaire within a longer timespan (p.6).

Overall, the manuscript is technically sound, the data and tests results persuasively support the conclusions, which are appropriately drawn. In addition, the authors are explicit with regards to the limits of results (page 17).

Concerning question 2 (Q2 in the review form), the authors clearly spell out the reasons for using Bayesian tests in the statistical analyses they had performed, detailing their strengths, as compared to traditional ones, in the task at hand. The article denotes rigour both methodologically and in explaining each research stage completed to analyse the data.

Moreover, the authors specify the tests used in every stage of their analysis (Bayesian correlation analysis; Pearson product moment correlation; Cronbach’s alpha test; Bayesian t-test; graphical posterior predictive check for the goodness of fit of the proposed model; Breusch-Pagan test for linearity and homoscedasticity).

The article includes comparisons to previously published results on the development of the importance of olfaction questionnaire (IO-Q) and on the translation of the questionnaire in Italian.

Descriptives and results of each tests are presented in tables and graphs for each stage of the analysis (both testing rounds, as total scores on the IO-Q and separately for each sub-scale, comparisons with previously published results, scatter plots on test-retest reliability including correlation coefficient).

A particular strength of this analysis is the examination of the influence of time on between tests on test-retest reliability (results presented in Fig 5, page 15 and explained on page 16), asserting its limits as well (for approximately 85% of the sample the duration was below 5 weeks between test and retest).

In addition, the authors included supplementary evidence for further inspection in the Appendix. Adding the English version of the questionnaire would be welcome for interested readers (eg. validation of the IO-Q in other languages).

With regards to making the data fully available (Q3), the authors clearly stated upon the submission of the article that data could not be shared since it is part of an ongoing study (acted according to the Danish law).

The language in the article (Q4) is clear, correct, and unambiguous. There is just a minor formulation that needs revision on page 18:

“…obtained with the Danish versus English IO-Q underscores validates its usage in Danish and its utility…”

Reviewer #3: 1. Maybe it would be better to change the keywords to the words not found in the title anymore such as the four subscales of the importance of olfaction. These are the association, application, consequence, and aggravation.

2. To spell out acronyms like BA because even if this is obvious already its acronyms used in other countries are not the same, say AB (in the Philippines). Also, AWF was mentioned multiple times in the paper but the definition was not stated. It may mean African Wildlife Foundation, Albama Writers’ Forum, Analysis Work File, etc. It would be better to spell it out even the first time, the word was mentioned. The same with EU COST, refereeing to European Cooperation in Science and technology and all acronyms used in the whole manuscript.

3. The link given in the manuscript, https://www.josineverhagen.com/?page_id=76 prompted me this . Maybe it would be better to explain the content on the file that can be accessed in the given link so that even if it will not be placed anymore.

4. Is it possible to give more information about the script by Josine Verhagen? And can you also mention in the paper who is Josine Verhagen? Not all are familiar with her. Though it can be seen in the references that she was mentioned as one of the authors cited in the paper since she was given importance, can you also mention that she is a data scientist or her credibility in your paper?

5. Can you also include the English version of the questionnaire aside from the Danish-translated questionnaire?

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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Test-retest reliability and validity of the Importance of Olfaction questionaire in Denmark

PONE-D-22-14194R1

Dear Dr. Tchemerinsky Konieczny,

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.

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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,

Sorana D. Bolboacă, Ph.D., M.Sc., M.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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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

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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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

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

Reviewer #1: I Don't Know

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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

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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: Thanks for the answers. From my point of view the manuscript looks much better and can be accepted in this form. For the questionnaire in English I think a link can be provided.

Reviewer #2: Authors denote careful attention to the comments of the reviewers by adequately addressing all of them.

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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: No

Reviewer #2: No

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