PONE-D-23-11338Introducing SoNHR – Reporting guidelines for social networks in health researchPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Luke,

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.

In particular, the reviewers have requested a more detailed description and justification of the methodological approach, and suggested to strengthen the section dedicated to the guidelines/recommendations. 

Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 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.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Stefano Ghinoi, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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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: Partly

Reviewer #2: Partly

Reviewer #3: Partly

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: N/A

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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

Reviewer #3: No

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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

Reviewer #3: 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: Dear Authors,

Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper. I found it relevant, timely and well written. Unfortunately, I also think that the current version of your paper suffers from some limitations. I have a few comments that hopefully will help you improve the paper. They are arranged by section.

INTRODUCTION

I think the motivation of this study could be strengthened and explained better. I appreciate that your idea is to draw a parallel between the benefits of reporting guidelines for other aspects of health science and the need for similar guidelines for network studies. Although I find this rationale meaningful, I would encourage you to contextualize your motivation more explicitly, explaining why reporting guidelines are needed for network science and what the risks/implications are of ignoring this need.

Furthermore, the category of "network studies in health sciences" is potentially very broad. Do you plan to develop a set of guidelines that suit any type of network studies/level of analysis/research questions? I think it would be worth clarifying this upfront as well as providing examples of what studies you have in mind and/or mentioning sub-streams of literature.

METHODS

1. I am not fully convinced by the approach you adopt to draft the initial 28 recommendations. While I do not doubt your extensive experience in the field (and the advantages of drawing on this), I believe your paper would benefit from the adoption of a more robust approach. This would also make the readers more confident about the conclusions you draw and ensure this initial list is not biased. This is relevant because – to the best of my understanding (pp. 10 and 12)– you asked the experts to provide suggestions on how to improve the listed recommendations, but not to indicate additional ones.

You could conduct a systematic – instead of an informal – literature review and arrange the findings into a table, where you list the most recurrent recommendations (setting a reasonable threshold for “recurrent”) that you can derive from extant literature. Then, you could match them with your own experience – briefly explaining and justifying the recommendations you have derived from your own work.

2. You report that the response rate to your expert panel survey is 45.6 %. I would encourage you to comment on this response rate, specifically on non-respondents. Did you check that the sample of respondents is not biased? Does it cover all key characteristics that you used to identify the initial sample?

DISCUSSION

It seems to me that most of the guidelines you provide apply to network studies across a variety of fields, not to health sciences specifically. Given the focus of your study, I encourage you to discuss in more detail – and in a more compelling way – the reasons why your guidelines are beneficial to health sciences, which drawbacks of existing studies they would allow addressing, which implications they would have for the reliability of results and policy implications. I appreciate your attempt to convey this message by explaining which audiences would benefit from your study, but I would recommend that you expand this section providing examples of research questions, empirical settings, etc. This consideration resonates with my comment on the introduction – and I think addressing both comments would strengthen your contribution.

Best of luck with the next steps.

Reviewer #2: This paper provides a set of 18 recommendations called as SoNHR- Social Networks in Health Research focusing on reporting and dissemination of social networks analysis within health research community. The research identifies the key gap of not having guidelines that help researchers report the study results of using social networks analysis in healthcare setting.

The paper addresses a relevant domain of study; however, at this point, the research is at a preliminary stage. Minor revisions are needed, especially on the following points:

- The initial set of recommendations that the authors provide are based on an “informal review”. The authors need to clarify what this exactly means and provide concrete measures to showcase how this review was conducted. The authors need to clarify what “their experience using network methods is” and substantiating this claim to show how exactly this is relevant in the set of recommendations provided.

- More empirical analysis are needed in the first stage of the set of recommendation;

- Results are well presented. However, the set of 18 recommendations are quite generic at the moment. The recommendations can benefit from concrete examples specifically contextualised to the setting.

Reviewer #3: Thanks for giving me the opportunity to read and review the paper. I found it interesting for the potential implications that are described, as it highlights the relevance of social sciences - and SNA more in particular - in health care studies. Unfortunately, I was not captured by any original contribution the paper should have produced. Recommendations are presented as very broad, not focused on the specific setting under investigation, and I did not find any original idea on how SNA methods may be adapted to health care. This is originally what I expected to find in the manuscript. Even if I appreciated very much the efforts of cross fertilization, again, I did not find an extact streamline the paper would contribute to.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Anna Piazza

Reviewer #3: No

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PONE-D-23-11338R1Introducing SoNHR – Reporting guidelines for social networks in health researchPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Luke,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, I feel that you have been able to address almost all the comments from the reviewers: however, while one reviewer has suggested to accept your paper, the second one still requires some minor revisions (in the Method section). Therefore, I 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 29 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,

Stefano Ghinoi, Ph.D.

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 #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: (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: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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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

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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

**********

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: Dear Authors, congratulations on a much improved paper. This revision has addressed all my concerns, henceforth I do not have further comments.

Reviewer #2: Method section: the authors should better explain how they conduct "a rapid review", why this is justifiable (pg.7); and the use of only one database such as Scopus (figure 1). Also, they should clarify the keywords used to conduct this rapid review.

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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: 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.

Introducing SoNHR – Reporting guidelines for social networks in health research

PONE-D-23-11338R2

Dear Dr. Luke,

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,

Stefano Ghinoi, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

 

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