PONE-D-22-27966The role of the arts in enhancing data literacy: a scoping review protocolPLOS ONE

Dear  Dr. Hannigan,

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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: Yes

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: Yes

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: Yes

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: Yes

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 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 submission outlines a scoping review protocol intended to synthesize academic understanding of how, when, and where the arts is being used to enhance data literacy. The methods are sound in relation to other reviews I have read or taken part in. The resulting review would be a valuable contribution to the growing body of work on arts and data literacy in multiple settings.

Introduction:

The review of rationale and context is clear and easy to understand for readers. The citations included are contextually appropriately. I have concerns about the scope being limited to academic products, because my personal experience in the field has shown numerous examples in k-12 learning settings that aren't producing formal academic outputs, and data art pieces in gallery settings. This is a well-known concern in mixed space reviews such as this one, so I encourage the authors to engage it and acknowledge it as a limitation to the methods.

Materials and Methods

I am unfamiliar with scoping reviews, but they are summarized effectively for me. The queries in Table 3 needs some work - there are multiple examples of overlapping clauses (if I've understood the boolean syntax correctly). For instance, once "arts" is included there is no need to include "literary arts", "visual arts", etc. And "danc*" likely matches "dance" so that is redundant; same for "music*" and "musical instrument". In addition some clauses should be more generic, such as using "mosaic*" instead of "mosaics". These detailed comments should be taken in context of the search platform, whose syntax I am not an expert on (ie. does it auto-stem? match partial words? etc). I also might suggest including the phrase "performance", to capture the telling of a data story though arts means.

Other comments:

The process will necessitate some hard-to-describe subjective judgements on inclusion/exclusion. This will make replication difficult, but the dual-review nature described should allow for transparency on application of the criteria.

Reviewer #2: This manuscript outlines a protocol to guide a scoping review aiming to identify and map the available evidence for the role of the arts in enhancing data literacy. It is a very interesting topic and, in my opinion, the protocol is well conceived and proposed, deserving publication,

I have concerns on the abstract and the text (discussion), as follows:

Abstract: should indicate more precisely what has been done. It states “ to date, there has been no comprehensive review of publications on the role of the arts in the context of data literacy” and it follows… “The key aim of this proposed scoping review is to identify and map the available evidence for the role of the arts in enhancing data literacy.” The reader concludes that the paper will perform the scoping review. However, in the next sentence we discover that the paper proposes a protocol to perform the scoping review on this subject. The frustration of reading a paper with an expectation and not finding the final review should be mitigated with a starting statement in the abstract clearly showing its goal (my suggestion): “This paper presents a protocol and a search strategy framework to perform a scoping review to identify and map the available evidence for the role of the arts in enhancing data literacy”. PLOS ONE welcomes original research submissions from the natural sciences, medical research, engineering, as well as the related social sciences and humanities, including (…) Protocols (…) that describe detailed plans for research projects. It is the case in the present manuscript, that fits PLOS ONE scope.

The text:

The authors adequately justify the need of the scoping review, present 4 Tables describing the concepts, definitions, and boundaries of the research question (Table 1), the eligibility criteria (Table 2), two examples of preliminary database searches (Table 3) showing 110 documents retrieved using the proposed strategy search in Scopus database, and 98 documents in Web of Science Core Collection, and preliminary charting elements and questions (Table 4) to apply in the documents found. The result is the proposed protocol as a methodological framework, which is interesting. Discussion could comment on some limitations of the study protocol. I can indicate at least 3:

(1) the use of a short ten-year period (>2012 publications), justified as “for currency”, but incompatible with the date of year of the Ottawa charter for health promotion (1986); the Fancourt and Finn scoping review published by WHO in 2019 relating the role of the arts and health cited in ref #9 presents 962 references, and the choice of starting this new scoping review at 2012 is not obvious nor necessarily adequate.

(2) the option for including only publications written in English: given that authors will search other sources that English-written databases (ERIC, Scholar google, grey literature, etc), it is a limitation to exclude, at least, French, Spanish or Portuguese written documents.

(3) the absence of the keyword ArtScience or SciArt, since STEAM is an acronym that does not represent all emerging literature on the arts as an entry point to science evidence.

Independently of these concerns, my overall opinion on the paper is that it deserves publication due to the originality and relevance of the subject, and adequacy of methodology.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: TANIA C. ARAUJO-JORGE

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The role of the arts in enhancing data literacy: a scoping review protocol

PONE-D-22-27966R1

Dear Dr. Hannigan,

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,

Elias Garcia-Pelegrin, Ph.D

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

The authors have addressed all the reviewer comments adequately, I am very pleased to be able to recommend acceptance at 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 #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 #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 #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 #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 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 #2: The authors have accepted and correctly addressed all the points that the reviewers raised upon the first version. The paper deserves 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 #2: Yes: TANIA C. ARAUJO JORGE

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