PONE-D-21-13590Applying Network Analysis to Assess the Development and Sustainability of Multi-Sector CoalitionsPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Heeren,

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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: Partly

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

Reviewer #1: I Don't Know

Reviewer #2: 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: 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

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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: I enjoyed reading this paper. It is clearly and succinctly written and reports from an interesting study. I am not equipped to interrogate all of the methods but overall my sense is that the analyses are robust.

The study design matches its aims, and I particularly liked the attempt to measure relationships pre- and post the initiative. The paper reports some important findings, especially re the limitations of such funding approaches when relationship-building requires a longer view.

I think the exclusively quantitative design is a limitation as the tendency is to over-simplify complex social and organisational variables. Some qualitative insights might have added nuance here.

My only suggestion for amending the paper is to elaborate a little on its contribution. The authors talk about ‘refining’ understanding but this could be tied to a prior assessment of limitations/gaps in the literature.

Reviewer #2: This is a very interesting paper, but I would urge you all to go back and think about why you are doing this study, motivate with theory, what are you are capturing in the “networks” and justify your dyadic measures more.

There is no theoretical motivation for this research provided. Secondly, what are the networks you are trying to examine? How is each network bounded? Please explanation what the networks are, at least in theory. And what is the rationale for the dyad level measures? Please explain/give more motivation. Can we assume that most of the organizations have dyadic relationships? What about triads? Or clique structures?

Please explain the creation of the dyad-level covariate which is the absolute difference in closeness centrality, thus capturing pairwise similarity in centrality of

network position. There are many centrality measures. Why is closeness centrality of theoretical or empirical importance herein?

What was the extent of the missing data? Please elaborate on this.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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PONE-D-21-13590R1Applying Network Analysis to Assess the Development and Sustainability of Multi-Sector CoalitionsPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Heeren,

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.

As you can see, both reviewers suggest relatively minor changes.  Please respond to these comments in your revised manuscript, including the suggestion of adding one more model indicated by Reviewer 4. 

Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 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:

• 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,

Cynthia Lakon, PhD, MPH

Guest Editor

PLOS ONE

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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.

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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: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #4: (No Response)

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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 #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: 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 #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: 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 #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: 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 #3: This paper reports on an inter-organizational analysis relationship formed within the context of a state-wide granting mechanism in response to field reports on the challenges of creating and sustaining cross-sector collaborations. A few comments to improve the study.

The one glaring issue, which is certainly not amenable is the reliance on one time period to measures pre-SIM, during SIM, and projected sustainment. Although I am not immediately aware of any such studies I am certain there are other studies which have assessed networks at multiple time points at one time. I would encourage the authors to find such studies, reference, and see how they describe this limitation. Moreover, I wonder if the authors can explore any ways in which they can “validate” these reports.

Second, the authors make no mention of who specifically, within each organization, completed the survey. Presumably each organization has multiple hierarchical levels ranging from CEO, Director, program manager, staff, research assistant, etc. Who was responsible for providing this information can have implications for what they can report. Indeed, a CEO is likely to have quite a different perception of the working relationships than a program manager. This should be analyzed as it might be that the integrator organization consisting of health service agencies may have delegated reporting (survey completion) differently than other organizations.

Line 107: A roster of all possible collaborators was roved to minimize recall error and strengthen the equity of reporting, a

“roved”? -> “provided

Line 120: For instance, some tasks require mutual trust and investment (e.g. data sharing) while execution of other activities (e.g. co-serving on an advisory board) are less intensive.(18)

Should this be “ … less interactive.”?

Line 147: you should cite Freeman, 1979 on closeness centrality and report which variant you use.

Lines 196-197: as per comment 2 above, was there only one individual reporting for each organization?

Lines 220-223: “Contrary to the hypothesis that organizations with more similar centrality in the preexisting network were more likely to form stimulated edges with one another, there was a significant positive effect of the absolute difference in closeness centrality between the organizations (OR = 1.10, 95% CI = [1.04, 1.16]).”

Lines 224-225: “Meaning, organizations with dissimilar centralities (i.e. pairs comprised of one core and one periphery organization) were more likely to form connections.”

Make a visual inspection to be certain these are new core-periphery ties, just because they closeness centrality differences are associated with new ties does not necessarily imply that.

But I would think that organizations with high and similar closeness centrality scores would already be connected. Is this controlled for? At the very least they would have a shared partner thus more likely to become connected.

It might be worth noting if these 7 sites were the 7 largest municipalities in Iowa (or not).

Lines 124-125: “For each collaboration, respondents indicated: “little trust/new relationship,” “some trust/developing relationship,” or “high trust/strong relationship.”

You might note as a limitation that trust and duration of relationship are not synonymous.

Reviewer #4: One suggestion I had is that in the “likely sustained” model, you might add an additional model that only includes the variables in the “stimulated” model. This would allow you to assess the degree to which these added variables (including strength of ties) might moderate the effects of your ACH structure variables. This potentially could provide additional insights.

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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 #3: Yes: Thomas W Valente

Reviewer #4: No

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Applying Network Analysis to Assess the Development and Sustainability of Multi-Sector Coalitions

PONE-D-21-13590R2

Dear Dr. Heeren,

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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Kind regards,

Cynthia Lakon, PhD, MPH

Guest Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Thank you for your revisions, they have addressed the remaining comments.

Reviewers' comments: