PONE-D-23-21058Towards a conceptual framework for the prevention of gambling-related harms: Findings from a scoping reviewPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Wheaton,

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   "I have read the journal's policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: JW, BF, AN, and SC have all received research funding from GambleAware. SC has received research funding from the Gambling Commission Regulatory Settlement funds. "

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Additional Editor Comments:

Please respond to all the issues raised by Reviewers 1 and 2.

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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: Yes

Reviewer #2: 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

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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: The authors have made an excellent job throughout the paper and in using systematic scoping review methodology. IThe paper is scientifically sound and strong, and I only have some minor notes the authors may want to consider.

Introduction clearly justify the need for this study. There is one excellent and potential paper to add when framing the study background: Price A, Hilbrecht M, Billi R. 2021. Charting a path towards a public health approach for gambling harm prevention. Z Gesundh Wiss. 29(1):37–53.

Research methods are described in sufficient detail and a scoping review methodology is a right choice here. One of the strengths of this review was that the search included grey literature, but on the other hand, their role, robustness and/or at least added benefits for this study were not discussed.

I was wondering that the search strategy begun from 2005 onwards and whether the same time cut-off was used when the authors searched grey literature. The authors cite UK-post legislation 2005. However, this choice of the year (2005) remains a bit unclear for me as a reader who is not familiar with the UK legislation.

I have no other comments. I wish the authors all the best with their important line of research.

Reviewer #2: Thank you for the possibility to review this interesting manuscript. The paper focuses on building a conceptual framework to assist in the prevention of gambling-related harms. Overall, such work is highly important. While gambling is increasingly understood as a public health issue, there has been a gap in our understanding regarding how the public health approach can be operationalised at different levels (treatment, prevention, policy). A conceptual framework that includes a wide understanding of harms and acknowledges the different actors in the field is both welcome and a necessary step forward.

However, having read the current manuscript, I feel that while the framework itself is relevant and its applicability is well described, there are some major shortcomings in how it was built methodologically.

The framework builds on a scoping review that appears to take different directions. The authors have reviewed existing work on frameworks on gambling harms (table 1) as well as public health strategies from gambling and other fields (table 2). Table 4 also uses some of the existing frameworks on gambling harms to build a summary.

How studies were chosen for each of these different sets of data and how they relate to each other is somewhat unclear. These should be described more systematically.

The identified public health strategies in gambling and other fields (table 2) also needs more elaboration. The included gambling literature is quite limited. Furthermore, there is no discussion on how gambling actually relates to or differs from the other included fields (alcohol, tobacco, HFSS). While some lessons could probably be learnt from these sectors, they also differ from gambling in many respects. Notably, digitalisation has impacted gambling in a very different way than these substance-based issues.

This leads me to question whether there could also be other public health strategies in the gambling field or whether the framework gives too much important to some strategies that are not so relevant for gambling.

The summary of harms (table 4) adopts the categorisation by Wardle et al. The justification that is given to this choice is that the categorisation is concise. However, is there a risk that such an approach can also neglect some important harm categories? The exclusion of crime is particularly unfortunate since as it stands, the model does not include harms that relate to the provision of gambling rather than the activity of gambling.

Minor issues:

The socio-ecological approach has been applied in a very similar way to gambling harms in the Wardle et al., framework. This should be acknowledged.

On p. 33 the authors note that they prefer language that is "less emotional" than for example "severity". Severity is a terms often used to describe the degree of gambling harms. I don't see how it is emotional.

There would be room for more concise language in many parts of the paper.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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PONE-D-23-21058R1Towards a conceptual framework for the prevention of gambling-related harms: Findings from a scoping reviewPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Wheaton,

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 30 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,

Francis Xavier Kasujja

Academic 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 #2: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

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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 #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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

Reviewer #2: N/A

Reviewer #3: N/A

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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 #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 #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 #2: Thank you again for this paper. I have re-read it with a lot of interest, and I think it has improved since the last version. The authors' responses were also very helpful to me as I was trying to understand some of the methodological choices made in the paper.

I still have some comments, that partly relate to my original comments.

First, Although you explained this to me well in the response, I think the article is still somewhat unclear about where the reviews included in table 1 (and 4) are coming from. I understand from your response to my previous comments that these tables were drawn separately from the systematic review. I think the confusion stems from the fact that this is a systematic review study, and such studies have a standard practice of reporting included studies in tables that look very much like table 1 (and 4).There is need for more clarity particularly on:

- How these frameworks were identified, based on what they were included in the table?

- What were the inclusion criteria for including some of these frameworks in table 4 later in the paper?

I think these issues could be explained under a separate heading in the methods section.

Second, I am still slightly stuck on the issue of crime. I appreciate the explanation given by the authors that crime can relate to the illegal provision of gambling, and was therefore excluded. This was mentioned at least in three different parts of the manuscript:

p.5.line 117; p. 10 line 136->; page 34. (version with track changes).

In the response to my previous comments, the authors note that crime that emerges from gambling is still included as a subcategory of harms. I think this needs to be in the manuscript as well. Furthermore, the paper by Banks & Waugh (that the authors also reference) also suggests that there are categories of gambling-related crime that are for example compliance-related. Are these included? I think just a clarifying sentence here would be enough.

Third, you note on page 11 line 173 (version with track changes) that you only based the analysis on peer reviewed literature and not grey literature. In the table with the included studies, you have also included some opinion pieces or correspondence. Are these peer reviewed?

Fourth, this is a suggestion: P. 31 has good discussion on the differences between gambling and substance-based commodities. You might add in a sentence or two summarising the comparison of the PH strategies identified across gambling/ other sectors. Were there strategies that were not captured by the gambling literature but that were included in the literature on the other commodities? Which ones were they and how did the emphasis differ across these products?

Reviewer #3: This is an excellent paper on a very important topic. This conceptual framework is highly needed in the sector as it will serve the needs of multiple stakeholders and support the development and implementation of various initiatives.

The authors have satisfactorily addressed the previous reviewers' comments. Only two small suggestions for consideration:

1. In the introduction, lines 35-36, the authors refer to "other harmful but legal sectors." Perhaps the authors want to reword so as to not label the other sectors as "harmful?" They instead may want to consider language such as "other sectors focused on reducing harms."

2. In a couple places the authors use the phrase "thanks to" in regards to digital transformation. They authors may want to consider "in part due to" instead.

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Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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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.

Towards a conceptual framework for the prevention of gambling-related harms: Findings from a scoping review

PONE-D-23-21058R2

Dear Dr. Wheaton,

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,

Francis Xavier Kasujja

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

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: All comments have been addressed

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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 #2: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #2: N/A

**********

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

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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 #2: Thank you, you have an excellent job. The article is now very clear and a very important addition to the literature. I fully support its publication. Good luck with your future research!

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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: No

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