Peer Review History

Original SubmissionNovember 11, 2022
Decision Letter - Qichun Zhang, Editor

PONE-D-22-31175A New Cubic Transmuted Power-Function Distribution: Properties, Inference, and ApplicationsPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Afify,

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.

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

ACADEMIC EDITOR: Please following reviewers' comments and proof read the revised version before resubmission

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

Please submit your revised manuscript by Feb 02 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,

Qichun Zhang, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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. In your Data Availability statement, you have not specified where the minimal data set underlying the results described in your manuscript can be found. PLOS defines a study's minimal data set as the underlying data used to reach the conclusions drawn in the manuscript and any additional data required to replicate the reported study findings in their entirety. All PLOS journals require that the minimal data set be made fully available. For more information about our data policy, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability.

""Upon re-submitting your revised manuscript, please upload your study’s minimal underlying data set as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and include the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers within your revised cover letter. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. Any potentially identifying patient information must be fully anonymized.

Important: If there are ethical or legal restrictions to sharing your data publicly, please explain these restrictions in detail. Please see our guidelines for more information on what we consider unacceptable restrictions to publicly sharing data: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. Note that it is not acceptable for the authors to be the sole named individuals responsible for ensuring data access.

We will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide in your cover letter.

3. Please ensure that you refer to Figure 5 in your text as, if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the figure.

Additional Editor Comments:

The paper is well written with publishable contents. However, some points have been noticed by reviewers, where the novelty of the paper needs to be further highlighted. The motivation is not clear and the impact of parameter selection should be discussed and analysed carefully.

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

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

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

**********

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

**********

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 authors, in this paper, proposed a new three-parameter cubic transmuted power distribution for which some

mathematical properties are derived. I have some major concerns about this paper. Please rearrange the paper using following comments.

1. The numerical technique is not properly discussed. Which numerical method or technique is used to attain the numerical solution of mathematical model.

2. Abstract does not describe the major theme of the paper.

3. You have demonstrated real data sets. Please elaborate their impacts on parameters.

4. How can be the performance of proposed estimators measured.

5. What are the main features of new cubic transmuted-power function. Discuss in Conclusion section.

6. What is new in the proposed mathematical model and why it is considered.

Reviewer #2: Overall, the manuscript is technically sound. However, the writing in the abstract, introduction and conclusion needs some work in order to reach an acceptable level for publication in this journal. Some examples:

1. In the abstract, the authors mention that some mathematical properties are derived. The properties should be explicitly mentioned for many reasons.

2.Page 2:Middle paragraph starts with "Researchers mention..." This is not good writing. The authors should completely rewrite this paragraph.

3. In the conclusion, the first paragraph starts with "In this study..." Throughout the manuscript, the authors refer to it as a paper, study etc. These are informal terms and need some polishing.

**********

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: Sohail Ahmad

Reviewer #2: No

**********

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.

Revision 1

Dear Professor Editor,

Enclosed herewith are the pdf of the revised version of our paper entitled “A New Cubic Transmuted Power-Function Distribution: Properties, Inference, and Applications”, which we hope you will find now satisfactory for publication in PloS One.

First, we would like to thank the Editor and the two reviewers for very constructive comments. In the revised version all suggestions and comments have been taken into account and addressed. All corrections and modifications are incorporated in the revised version and highlighted in RED color.

We now answer the comments made by the editor and reviewers in the order they appeared in the reports.

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

Answer: We did our best to ensure that the paper is prepared according to PloS ONE style.

2. In your Data Availability statement, you have not specified where the minimal data set underlying the results described in your manuscript can be found. PLOS defines a study's minimal data set as the underlying data used to reach the conclusions drawn in the manuscript and any additional data required to replicate the reported study findings in their entirety. All PLOS journals require that the minimal data set be made fully available. For more information about our data policy, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability.

""Upon re-submitting your revised manuscript, please upload your study’s minimal underlying data set as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and include the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers within your revised cover letter. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. Any potentially identifying patient information must be fully anonymized.

Important: If there are ethical or legal restrictions to sharing your data publicly, please explain these restrictions in detail. Please see our guidelines for more information on what we consider unacceptable restrictions to publicly sharing data: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. Note that it is not acceptable for the authors to be the sole named individuals responsible for ensuring data access.

We will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide in your cover letter.

Answer: This is not applicable in our case. The data set is already mentioned in the manuscript.

3. Please ensure that you refer to Figure 5 in your text as, if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the figure.

Answer: Thank you. This typo is corrected.

Additional Editor Comments:

The paper is well written with publishable contents. However, some points have been noticed by reviewers, where the novelty of the paper needs to be further highlighted. The motivation is not clear and the impact of parameter selection should be discussed and analysed carefully.

Answer: Many thanks for these comments. We have addressed each and every comment raised by the two reviewers. All corrections have been incorporated in RED color.

Reviewers’ Comments to the Authors:

Reviewer #1: The authors, in this paper, proposed a new three-parameter cubic transmuted power distribution for which some mathematical properties are derived. I have some major concerns about this paper. Please rearrange the paper using following comments.

1. The numerical technique is not properly discussed. Which numerical method or technique is used to attain the numerical solution of mathematical model.

Answer: Thanks for this comment. The R software is used to obtain simulation results and the empirical results. We mentioned this in Sections 5 and 6.

2. Abstract does not describe the major theme of the paper.

Answer: Thank you. The abstract is improved.

3. You have demonstrated real data sets. Please elaborate their impacts on parameters.

Answer: The estimates of the parameters in the application show a good fit to the electronic devices data, as shown in Figure 4.

4. How can be the performance of proposed estimators measured.

Answer: Thanks for this comment. The performance of the proposed estimators can be explored and measured using simulation results through calculating some measures such as the average biases (AB) and mean square errors (MSE) for all studied cases as shown in Tables 2-6.

5. What are the main features of new cubic transmuted-power function. Discuss in conclusion section.

Answer: Thanks for this comment. It is mentioned in the conclusion section.

6. What is new in the proposed mathematical model and why it is considered.

Answer: The idea behind this construction is simple and it aims to obtain more flexible models that adapt to empirical data distributions. It is not easy to find pdf and cdf that are shaped like a bathtub and the NCTPF model has that property.

Reviewer #2: Overall, the manuscript is technically sound. However, the writing in the abstract, introduction and conclusion needs some work in order to reach an acceptable level for publication in this journal. Some examples:

1. In the abstract, the authors mention that some mathematical properties are derived. The properties should be explicitly mentioned for many reasons.

Answer: Thanks for your comment. We have added them in the abstract.

2. Page 2: Middle paragraph starts with "Researchers mention..." This is not good writing. The authors should completely rewrite this paragraph.

Answer: Thanks for careful reading. We have corrected them.

3. In the conclusion, the first paragraph starts with "In this study..." Throughout the manuscript, the authors refer to it as a paper, study etc. These are informal terms and need some polishing.

Answer: Thank you. This typo is corrected.

Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: Response letter_R1.pdf
Decision Letter - Qichun Zhang, Editor

A New Cubic Transmuted Power-Function Distribution: Properties, Inference, and Applications

PONE-D-22-31175R1

Dear Dr. Afify,

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,

Qichun Zhang, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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: 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 #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

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 #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. 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 is well revised and organised by the authors. I have noticed that the paper has been revised significantly. However, I recommend the paper for publication.

Reviewer #2: All of my suggestions were implemented within reason. This manuscript is now ready for publication in this journal.

**********

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: Sohail Ahmad

Reviewer #2: No

**********

Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Qichun Zhang, Editor

PONE-D-22-31175R1

A new cubic transmuted power-function distribution: properties, inference, and applications

Dear Dr. Afify:

I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. 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.

If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org.

Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access.

Kind regards,

PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff

on behalf of

Dr. Qichun Zhang

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .