PONE-D-22-03601The associations between adherence to the Mediterranean Diet and physical fitness in young, middle-aged, and older adults: a protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysisPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Bizzozero-Peroni,

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"B.B.-P. was supported by a grant from the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha co-financed by the European Social Fund (2020-PREDUCLM-16746) and from the Agencia Nacional de Investigación e Innovación. 

M.I.L.-L.-T (2022-PREDUCLM-XXX, recent grant-awaiting number contract) and S.N.d.A.-A. (2020-PREDUCLM-16704) are supported by a grant from the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha.

A.E.M. was supported by a ‘Beatriz Galindo’ contraact (BEAGAL18/00093) by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport. 

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Additional Editor Comments:

The reviewers disagree, as one of them accepts the manuscript in current form and the other asks for a revision. We will proceed with a minor revision!

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does the manuscript provide a valid rationale for the proposed study, with clearly identified and justified research questions?

The research question outlined is expected to address a valid academic problem or topic and contribute to the base of knowledge in the field.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Is the protocol technically sound and planned in a manner that will lead to a meaningful outcome and allow testing the stated hypotheses?

The manuscript should describe the methods in sufficient detail to prevent undisclosed flexibility in the experimental procedure or analysis pipeline, including sufficient outcome-neutral conditions (e.g. necessary controls, absence of floor or ceiling effects) to test the proposed hypotheses and a statistical power analysis where applicable. As there may be aspects of the methodology and analysis which can only be refined once the work is undertaken, authors should outline potential assumptions and explicitly describe what aspects of the proposed analyses, if any, are exploratory.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Is the methodology feasible and described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicable?

Descriptions of methods and materials in the protocol should be reported in sufficient detail for another researcher to reproduce all experiments and analyses. The protocol should describe the appropriate controls, sample size calculations, and replication needed to ensure that the data are robust and reproducible.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Have the authors described where all data underlying the findings will be made available when the study is complete?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception, at the time of publication. 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: No

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 and, if applicable, provide comments about issues authors must address before this protocol can be accepted for publication. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about research or publication ethics.

You may also provide optional suggestions and comments to authors that they might find helpful in planning their study.

(Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This work provide a poor rationale for the need of a systematic review including metanalytic pooling of data about the adherence to Mediterranean diet and health-related physical fitness throughout life cycle of adulthood.

However, the manuscript is not suitable for publication as it seems to be a proposal work that was not formatted to meet journal manuscript requirement. The use of future tense in throughout the manuscript specifically in methodology gives evidence of this remark and raise important issue on plagiarism attempt. The methodology section must be fully rewritten and focus on important information related to results and address specifically what was exactly done to obtain the meta-analysis outcomes presented in this work. Most importantly, no results text is available in the submitted manuscript. Moreover, it is stated that “ the results of this research will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal” .

Abstract shall be written in past tense and shall summarize the research article. I suggest to rewrite the abstract and avoid exhausting methods description but rather providing rational, short description of the methodology, results and impact of the metanalysis review.

Introduction:

Line 82 “ the aim of this protocol is to provide”… not sure if “protocol” suits with the work presented in this research.

Methods:

why authors used future tense? I suggest authors read back the manuscript and be consistent using past tense for descriptive information in this section.

Lines 96- 112Authors shall write a paragraph with sentence and not use bullets to state inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Line 136. Figure 1 cannot be found within the manuscript or not properly labeled.

Line 151. Scoring for adherence to Mediterranean diet shall be briefly described in addition to previous references.

Results: Line 202-203 No results text is available in the submitted manuscript. Moreover, its is stated that “ the results of this research will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal”

Discussion is too short and with lack of results description, it is not possible to validate arguments raised int his section.

Reviewer #2: This is a very well written protocol, well done!

A few comments:

p.4 line 65, could you please expand?

p.8 line 31: will examine

p. 10 line 177: will be compared

And a suggestion: maybe you would like to present your results per age group. And maybe you could do your analysis per age group? Of course this depends on the evaluation of different outcomes in included studies, but worth thinking about it.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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The associations between adherence to the Mediterranean Diet and physical fitness in young, middle-aged, and older adults: a protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis

PONE-D-22-03601R1

Dear Dr. Bizzozero-Peroni,

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,

Maria G Grammatikopoulou

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does the manuscript provide a valid rationale for the proposed study, with clearly identified and justified research questions?

The research question outlined is expected to address a valid academic problem or topic and contribute to the base of knowledge in the field.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

2. Is the protocol technically sound and planned in a manner that will lead to a meaningful outcome and allow testing the stated hypotheses?

The manuscript should describe the methods in sufficient detail to prevent undisclosed flexibility in the experimental procedure or analysis pipeline, including sufficient outcome-neutral conditions (e.g. necessary controls, absence of floor or ceiling effects) to test the proposed hypotheses and a statistical power analysis where applicable. As there may be aspects of the methodology and analysis which can only be refined once the work is undertaken, authors should outline potential assumptions and explicitly describe what aspects of the proposed analyses, if any, are exploratory.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Is the methodology feasible and described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicable?

Descriptions of methods and materials in the protocol should be reported in sufficient detail for another researcher to reproduce all experiments and analyses. The protocol should describe the appropriate controls, sample size calculations, and replication needed to ensure that the data are robust and reproducible.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors described where all data underlying the findings will be made available when the study is complete?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception, at the time of publication. 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 and, if applicable, provide comments about issues authors must address before this protocol can be accepted for publication. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about research or publication ethics.

You may also provide optional suggestions and comments to authors that they might find helpful in planning their study.

(Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The Authors have diligently addressed all the concerns raised by the Reviewers and the manuscript meet PLOSOne requirements to be suitable for publications.

Reviewer #2: There are no further comments from me. The protocol is sufficiently explained and it is ready for publication.

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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: Yes: Sofi G Julien

Reviewer #2: No

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