The performance of interrupted time series designs with a limited number of time points: Learning losses due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic

Florian D. van Leeuwen; Peter Lugtig; Remco Feskens

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0301301

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionDecember 13, 2023
13 Feb 2024 Decision Letter - Sathishkumar Veerappampalayam Easwaramoorthy, Editor PONE-D-23-39424The performance of interrupted time series designs with a limited number of time points: Learning losses due to school closures during the COVID pandemicPLOS ONE Dear Dr. van Leeuwen, 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 Mar 29 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. 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Please ensure that you have an ORCID iD and that it is validated in Editorial Manager. To do this, go to ‘Update my Information’ (in the upper left-hand corner of the main menu), and click on the Fetch/Validate link next to the ORCID field. This will take you to the ORCID site and allow you to create a new iD or authenticate a pre-existing iD in Editorial Manager. Please see the following video for instructions on linking an ORCID iD to your Editorial Manager account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xcclfuvtxQ 5. Please ensure that you refer to Figure 11 in your text as, if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the figure. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] 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: This is a nice study examining the potential of ITS on naturalistic settings with the covid-19 pandemic as an example. I would recommend emphasizing the key contribution of this study in more detail in the abstract. It is nice that the authors highlight the potential of the ITS for such settings as other analyses such as the difference-in-difference approach also have their limitations. The article is overall well-written and I did not detect potential flaws. AS such, I have no more concrete points to add. Reviewer #2: The interrupted time series (ITS) have been addressed in this study. The Monte Carlo simulation method has been selected to serve the proposed issues. Some results collected have been presented in this study. This study is interesting however there are some drawbacks that the authors should address them to improve this study. 1.There are a lot of typing mistakes which have been found in this paper. 2.The main contribution of this study must be provided. 3.The proposed models must be indicated clearly. 4.The evaluation and analysis of collected results must be indicated clearly. 5.The significance of this study must be provided in the conclusion part. ****** 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: No Reviewer #2: No ******** [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: ID PONE-D-23-39424 Reviewer.doc https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0301301.r001
Revision 1
11 Mar 2024 Author Response Point-by-point reply letter to reviewer comments of article PONE-D-23-39424 “The performance of interrupted time series designs with a limited number of time points: Learning losses due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic” We want to thank the (associate) editor(s) and anonymous reviewers for their comments on our earlier version of the manuscript “The performance of interrupted time series designs with a limited number of time points: Learning losses due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic”. In this letter we provide a point-by-point reply to the comments provided, and indicate how we have changed the main text of the paper. The comments have been helpful, especially in putting more emphasis on the main contribution of the paper, and several stylistic and textual changes. We are confident the manuscript has been improved, and are looking forward to see this manuscript published in PLos One. Comments by the (associate) editor(s): 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. We suggest you thoroughly copyedit your manuscript for language usage, spelling, and grammar. If you do not know anyone who can help you do this, you may wish to consider employing a professional scientific editing All authors went through the manuscript again, and have made about 150 changes to the manuscript in terms of spelling, style and grammar. We attach a version of the manuscript with tracked changes, so it is easy to see what we changed. The manuscript has benefited from this. 3. Please provide additional details regarding participant consent. In the ethics statement in the Methods and online submission information, please ensure that you have specified what type you obtained (for instance, written or verbal, and if verbal, how it was documented and witnessed). If your study included minors, state whether you obtained consent from parents or guardians. If the need for consent was waived by the ethics committee, please include this information. We obtained written consent from the ethical review board. We have added this to the text, and along with the registration number for this study, it is possible to locate our ethical review at Utrecht University. Once you have amended this/these statement(s) in the Methods section of the manuscript, please add the same text to the “Ethics Statement” field of the submission form (via “Edit Submission”). We have added this as well. 4. PLOS requires an ORCID iD for the corresponding author in Editorial Manager on papers submitted after December 6th, 2016. Please ensure that you have an ORCID iD and that it is validated in Editorial Manager. To do this, go to ‘Update my Information’ (in the upper left-hand corner of the main menu), and click on the Fetch/Validate link next to the ORCID field. This will take you to the ORCID site and allow you to create a new iD or authenticate a pre-existing iD in Editorial Manager. Please see the following video for instructions on linking an ORCID iD to your Editorial Manager account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xcclfuvtxQ We have added the ORCID ID “0009-0009-7092-2848” for the corrspondinng author into Editrial Manager. 5. Please ensure that you refer to Figure 11 in your text as, if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the figure. We have added this reference to Figure 11 to the text. Comments by Reviewer 1: This is a nice study examining the potential of ITS on naturalistic settings with the covid-19 pandemic as an example. I would recommend emphasizing the key contribution of this study in more detail in the abstract. It is nice that the authors highlight the potential of the ITS for such settings as other analyses such as the difference-in-difference approach also have their limitations. The article is overall well-written and I did not detect potential flaws. AS such, I have no more concrete points to add. We thank the reviewer for these comments. We have rewritten parts of the abstract, introduction, background and discussion sections to put more emphasis on the contribution of this article, and the potential of the ITS model, following similar comments by reviewer#2. Comments by Reviewer 2: The interrupted time series (ITS) have been addressed in this study. The Monte Carlo simulation method has been selected to serve the proposed issues. Some results collected have been presented in this study. This study is interesting however there are some drawbacks that the authors should address them to improve this study. 1.There are a lot of typing mistakes which have been found in this paper. All authors went through the manuscript again, and have made about 50 changes to the manuscript in terms of spelling, style and grammar. We attach a version of the manuscript with tracked changes, so it is easy to see what we changed. The manuscript has benefited from this. 2.The main contribution of this study must be provided. Here, we made several changes to the abstract (based on #R1 comments), the introduction, background and discussion to highlight the main contribution (under what circumstances can the ITS be used). The version with tracked changes provides can be used to easily see these changes. 3.The proposed models must be indicated clearly. Equations 1 to 5 show the basic ITS model, along with several variations, all building on the standard regression model in equation 1, so that it is easy to readers familiar with regression what the ITS model does. In table 5 we have indicated the specific simulation scenario’s and model used to evaluate the ITS. These models in terms of notation directly relate to equations 1 to 5. We hope this clarifies for the reviewer the models we use. 4.The evaluation and analysis of collected results must be indicated clearly. We did not alter the results section greatly (apart from grammar and spelling), but we did add a “reading guide” at the start of the results to guide readers through this section: “The performance of the ITS design is discussed per simulation scenario in the order of Table 5. The most relevant figures for the power, bias and precision are shown in the main text. The performance measures are discussed in the performance section. The remainder of the figures can be found in the appendix. The heatmaps indicate the performance of the models, as can be inferred by the colour, for different scenarios of the number of time points, sample size and effect size. Using heatmaps allows for seeing patterns in the results.” 5.The significance of this study must be provided in the conclusion part. This comment is related to comment 2. We have changed the last part of this section to highlight the significance of the study: “In a nutshell, we conclude that the interrupted time series design is a strong method for assessing changes over time, even with few time points. This paper shows that the notion that many time points are always necessary for an ITS analysis is shown to be incorrect. Additionally, this paper shows that employing ITS designs can be difficult when the data are complex, such as multiple interventions or non-linear time effects. The results from the simulation study can be used as a guide for future research. Researchers should thus inspect their data, hypothesize about effect sizes, and consider multiple models to be used for estimation to decide if there is enough power.” Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0301301.r002
29 Apr 2024 Decision Letter - Chenfeng Xiong, Editor PONE-D-23-39424R1The performance of interrupted time series designs with a limited number of time points: Learning losses due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemicPLOS ONE Dear Dr. van Leeuwen, 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 address the remaining comments from the reviewers. Specifically, justifications of why the chosen method is superior to other alternative approaches should be carefully discussed/quantified. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jun 13 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, Chenfeng Xiong Academic Editor PLOS ONE [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] 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) ******** 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: (No Response) ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 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: (No Response) ****** 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: (No Response) ****** 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: All comments have been nicely addressed and I have nothing to add. Really nice work that is timely and will be interesting to read for others. Reviewer #2: The authors have addressed some comments from this reviewer. However, there are some existing points that the authors should address them to improve this study. 1.The keywords must be implemented in this study. 2.The authors must explain why the Monte Carlo simulation method has been employed in this study. 3.The discussion part must be implemented to analyze the prioritization and the comparison with the experimental working from the proposed methods. 4.The conclusion must be re-written shortly to describe the significance of this study. 5.The quality of figures is very poor. Kindly provide the high quality solution of these figures. ****** 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 ******** [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: ID PONE-D-23-39424-R1 Reviewer.doc https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0301301.r003
Revision 2
31 May 2024 Author Response Reviewer #1: All comments have been nicely addressed and I have nothing to add. Really nice work that is timely and will be interesting to read for others. We want to thank the reviewer for reviewing our manuscript again, and are happy we have been able to address all comments Reviewer #2: The authors have addressed some comments from this reviewer. However, there are some existing points that the authors should address them to improve this study. reply: We have tried to address these remaining concerns by changing the manuscript in some specific sections: 1.The keywords must be implemented in this study. reply: We have added the following keywords: Natural experiment, Interrupted time series, Segmented regression, Simulation study, Power. All are named numerus times in the manuscript and play a vital role in the article. 2.The authors must explain why the Monte Carlo simulation method has been employed in this study. reply: We have added a short section in the methods section to explain why we use a Monte Carlo simulation study: "A Monte Carlo simulation study is used to assess the performance of different ITS designs over 384 scenarios. Monte Carlo simulation allows us to estimate our statistics of interest by eliminating the noise caused by random sampling [51]. This allows us to inspect under which circumstances the ITS designs can estimate an effect well. In the simulation study, data are generated based on predefined parameters. These are then compared to the estimates to evaluate the performance of the models." 3.The discussion part must be implemented to analyze the prioritization and the comparison with the experimental working from the proposed methods. reply: we changed the discussion section in two ways (also to adress the next comment). 1. We added a sentence to the main findings, to illustrate the implications of the simulation: "This research has investigated the performance of the standard ITS design as well as that of various extensions, in situations with limited data. While the ITS design works well under many different circumstances, there are some factors to consider before running an analysis: the sample size in the case of a step change, the number of time points for a slope change, and the problem of underfitting\\overfitting. Not one of these factors alone can account for the power, it always depends on the a combination of factors. 2. We have added a conclusion section (see also next comment) 4.The conclusion must be re-written shortly to describe the significance of this study. reply: we have restructured the discussion section, and now added a separate conclusion section 5.The quality of figures is very poor. Kindly provide the high quality solution of these figures. reply: the figures are now all available as vector-based figures, so quality issues should no longer be there. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0301301.r004
5 Jun 2024 Decision Letter - Chenfeng Xiong, Editor The performance of interrupted time series designs with a limited number of time points: Learning losses due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic PONE-D-23-39424R2 Dear Dr. van Leeuwen, 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 will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, 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, Chenfeng Xiong 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 ******** 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: 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: The authors have addressed all comments from this reviewer. The current version now looks nice and could be accepted to publish on Plos One. ****** 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: No ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0301301.r005
Formally Accepted
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