PONE-D-23-36476The Impact of Work-family Conflict on job Burnout among Community Workers in ChinaPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Wu,

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Reviewers' comments:

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Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

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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: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

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Reviewer #1: The paper is well structured and well written besides focusing on a relevant and timely topic and merits publication subject to incorporating changes/suggestions on a few areas that need further improvement. These are as under;

1- The Introduction section needs to develop proper rational and motivation for the study. For example why not building the rational of the study in context of COVID-19.

2- Through out the document and specially in the Introduction Section, the author has made claims that need to be properly backed by citations. For example we can see phrases in the intro like " Many researchers have explored...." , "Much has been explored by researchers" , and " Some Scholars have realized that...." are a few to mention here. All these phrases need to be backed by relevant citations.

3-It seems like some of the author guidelines for formatting have been ignored/not followed in some places. For example we can see spaces before headings at some places and even the way Citations are done in text in the literature section are not in the standard format.

4-Most of the literature cited in the text of the document is outdated. More relevant and fresh studies need to be cited. Specially in the Literature Section. Moreover, reference to studies conducted in the Chinese context are highly missing and must be included.

5-In Section 2.5 i.e Job Demand-Resource Model, the phrase "...formed by two kind of factors and the health....." is too long and also seems incomplete and hence conveys no meaning.

6-The Literature Review section needs to be split into two distinct parts i.e., i) Empirical Literature and ii) Theoretical Literature/Underpinnings. Currently the theoretical literature citations and theoretical underpinnings are merged which creates confusion.

7-The diagram "Theoretical Framework" seems miss-labelled. It should be re-labelled as "Conceptual Model".

8-All the Hypotheses need to be backed/supported with the help of relevant literature. Currently in the document this section does not have any citations which is strange to note.

9-The author needs to stick to one type of phrasing the hypotheses. The use of words "in other words" is not appropriate. Moreover, the versions of hypotheses mentioned after "in other words" seem more appropriate and therefore only those should be mentioned.

10-The word " Samples" in the heading of Section 4.1 and Table 1 needs to be corrected. It should be "Sample".

11-While the Author has mentioned details of the number of respondents and questionnaires returned etc. We still fail to see details of the figures about i) the population ii) No of questionnaires that were actually distributed/sent/shared iii) The sample selection criteria (eg any formula or procedure followed to arrive at the current number of respondents)

12-A very striking remark is that the Table 1 on Characteristics of the Sample shows that about 75.5% of the sample consists of Female respondents. The author has even also commented on it. However, it seems that this thing is making the sample highly biased towards females only. The Author needs to build justification of this bias or present a proper rationale behind focusing more on females.

13-Finally, while the author has followed a very rigorous statistical procedure and has derived a number of findings, a comparison with similar/dissimilar findings n previous literature with citations needs to be incorporated to improve the quality of the discussion on findings.

Reviewer #2: Overall, It was a good effort. I have few suggestions which may include: Rewrite the abstract as it was not depicting the whole article, add latest references in introduction section, add few lines to describe the importance of the research, research problem should be backed with contemporary references, the researchers may add a paragraph in methodology section to describe the data collection methods, sampling technique and data analysis method, tables should be presented in an appropriate way, researcher should add last five years references in all chapters.

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Reviewer #1: Yes:  Dr. Majid Jamal Khan

Reviewer #2: Yes:  Muhammad Faizan Khan

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The Impact of Work-family Conflict on job Burnout among Community Workers in China

PONE-D-23-36476R1

Dear Dr. Wu,

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.

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Kind regards,

Zahra Masood Bhutta

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE