PONE-D-22-34984Variables associated with owner perceptions of the health of their dog: further analysis of data from a large international surveyPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. German,

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 two reviewers come up with conflicting decisions; reviewer#1 accept and reviewer #2 reject. Reviewer #2 despite  has an obvious conflict of interest, has made detailed comments BUT methodology and statistical analysis needs a point by point critical response. Obviously this article needs to address the issues raised by reviewers #2 before reaching a final decision or invite additional reviewers. 

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Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 20 2023 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.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Gizat Almaw

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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2. Thank you for stating the following in the Competing Interests section: 

"AJG is an employee of the University of Liverpool, but his position is financially-supported by Royal Canin.  AJG has also received financial remuneration and gifts for providing educational material, speaking at conferences, and consultancy work, all unrelated to the current study.  Royal Canin had no involvement in any aspect of the current work including study design, data analysis, drafting the manuscript or the decision to submit the work for publication.

RBJ is an employee of the University of Liverpool, whose salary is financially-supported by the Higher Education Funding Council for England.  RBJ also receives a stipend from United Kingdom Research and Innovation for work as a panellist for the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council."

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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: No

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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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: Happy to have reviewed the paper titled "variables associated with owner perceptions of the health of their dog: further analysis of data from a large international survey".

A timely and well-written paper with extensive analysis of data.

The authors have produced additional information on owner-reported dog health status and their diet using different statistical techniques to create models that best predicted owner opinions of health, and to identify the relative importance of the variables that contributed to the final model.

Reviewer #2: This authors of this current study responded to our prior Knight et al (2022) study (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265662), after reanalysing the dataset we collected, which is available open access.

For my review please see the attachment.

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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.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Andrew Knight

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: review 2023 05 24.docx

PONE-D-22-34984R1Variables associated with owner perceptions of the health of their dog: further analysis of data from a large international surveyPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. German,

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 Dec 18 2023 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,

Juan J Loor

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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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 #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: (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 #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

Reviewer #3: Partly

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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

Reviewer #3: 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: None

Reviewer #2: The authors of this current study responded to our prior Knight et al (2022) study (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265662), after reanalysing the dataset we collected, which is available open access. Please see attachment for my review.

Reviewer #3: The authors present a secondary analysis of a dataset from a previously published study on dog diet and health outcomes. The authors' goal was to incorporate more dog and owner information into models to account for possible confounding. The authors provide extensive detail in supplemental material (including statistical code), in addition to the manuscript itself, enabling the readers to follow along and understand exactly what was done. Although the authors approached the question using multiple approaches, generally arriving at similar conclusions, I do have some concerns about the approach. The manuscript will be strengthened if the authors consider the following points:

1. The authors use UMAP and DBSCAN as exploratory tools to assess the underlying structure of the data. They state they coerced all variables to be numeric in order to use these techniques. It is not clear to me that this is a sufficient way to handle the non-ordinal categorical variables (such as diet, gender and location). All examples I looked up for UMAP and DBSCAN focused only on variables that were inherently numeric and since these methods appear to have some sort of "distance" that is calculated, the numeric values matter. Do authors arrive at the same clusters if other orderings (numeric assignments) of the non-ordinal data are used?

2. Using healthcare variables (# of vet visits, prescribed medication by vet, on therapeutic diet) as predictors of owner perceived health of their pet seems not all that informative, since likely these variables are a part of an owner's assessment of the health of their pet. For example, I find it hard to believe that very many owners who had to take their pet to the vet numerous times in a year would characterize their pet as healthy. So, it seems obvious that these would end up being the most predictive of the outcome. Since, to me, they seem to be part of the outcome, why consider them as predictors at all? Authors could instead use those as alternative outcome measures of health and see how diet and dog and owner characteristics are associated with perceived health.

Minor points:

1. line 43-44: "albeit having limited although... was limited" is awkwardly phrased.

2. line 50: "that diet the fed" is awkwardly phrased

3. line 318 - it appears as though authors have switched vegan and vegetarian (Table 1 has 493 vegetarians and 221 vegans, while the text has them reversed).

4. lines 325-328: the numbers given for owners identifying as vegan (324) does not make sense given the numbers in Table 1 - even if the labels are reversed in Table 1, 324 would not be 56% of all vegan owners. Also, the numbers of vegetarian and vegan diets for the dogs do not match those presented in Table 1. Finally, it is not clear why the number of observations in the cluster mentioned in this section changes depending on whether it is being illustrated by owner diet or by dog diet (381 vs 383).

5. In supplemental figures S1 and S2, why are authors not using the processed variables (with collapsed categories) for client age and education as described in lines 161-163?

6. How were diets for those on a therapeutic diet handled? Those would be at the recommendation of the veterinarian, so not exactly the complete choice of the owner.

7. To avoid confusion in the usage of the variables that are derived from the same information, authors should only mention the "selected" one for consideration in the multivariable models. For example, in lines 395-396, authors do not need to mention both breed size category and giant breed - their methods describe how they chose the "best" variable. I do wonder, however, in a situation like this where giant breed results in a lower BIC, if authors are in fact combining too many breeds together by just using this single binary variable to represent breed.

8. The list of variables considered for the multiple regression in lines 435-437 does not seem to correspond to the results in Table 3 and the approach described in the Methods section for selection of those variables. For example, owner gender, animal related career and neuter status all seem to be variables that should be considered...and it is not clear why giant breed is being considered. The same can be said for the list of variables give in lines 513-515. Authors need to make sure what they state matches their results and the approach they say they took.

9. captions to figures 5, 6, 8, 9 - authors refer to a false-negative rate (lines 488, 501,560, 573), but these should be false positive rates based on your figure.

10. lines 603: authors state that dog diet was not associated with the significant illness outcome, but based on Table 4, raw diet was.

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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: Yes: Andrew Knight

Reviewer #3: No

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[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: review 2023 07 19.docx

PONE-D-22-34984R2Variables associated with owner perceptions of the health of their dog: further analysis of data from a large international surveyPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. German,

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 Apr 25 2024 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,

Juan J Loor

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.

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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 #2: (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 #2: Partly

**********

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

Reviewer #2: 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 #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: I appreciate the many improvements made within the current version.

Minor revisions are required - please see attached.

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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 #2: Yes: Andrew Knight

**********

[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: Review 2024 02 26.docx

Variables associated with owner perceptions of the health of their dog: further analysis of data from a large international survey

PONE-D-22-34984R3

Dear Dr. German,

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,

Juan J Loor

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

The paper has undergone a fair amount of revisions and I believe the authors have addressed all outstanding issues.

Reviewers' comments: