PONE-D-23-40011Precision Prevention in Worksite Health – A Scoping Review on Research Trends and GapsPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Friedrich,

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 May 31 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,

Yashendra Sethi

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

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 note that Figure 3 in your submission contain [map/satellite] images which may be copyrighted. All PLOS content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which means that the manuscript, images, and Supporting Information files will be freely available online, and any third party is permitted to access, download, copy, distribute, and use these materials in any way, even commercially, with proper attribution. For these reasons, we cannot publish previously copyrighted maps or satellite images created using proprietary data, such as Google software (Google Maps, Street View, and Earth). For more information, see our copyright guidelines: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/licenses-and-copyright.

We require you to either (1) present written permission from the copyright holder to publish these figures specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license, or (2) remove the figures from your submission:

a. You may seek permission from the original copyright holder of Figure 3 to publish the content specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license.  

We recommend that you contact the original copyright holder with the Content Permission Form (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=7c09/content-permission-form.pdf) and the following text:

“I request permission for the open-access journal PLOS ONE to publish XXX under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Please be aware that this license allows unrestricted use and distribution, even commercially, by third parties. Please reply and provide explicit written permission to publish XXX under a CC BY license and complete the attached form.”

Please upload the completed Content Permission Form or other proof of granted permissions as an ""Other"" file with your submission.

In the figure caption of the copyrighted figure, please include the following text: “Reprinted from [ref] under a CC BY license, with permission from [name of publisher], original copyright [original copyright year].”

b. If you are unable to obtain permission from the original copyright holder to publish these figures under the CC BY 4.0 license or if the copyright holder’s requirements are incompatible with the CC BY 4.0 license, please either i) remove the figure or ii) supply a replacement figure that complies with the CC BY 4.0 license. Please check copyright information on all replacement figures and update the figure caption with source information. If applicable, please specify in the figure caption text when a figure is similar but not identical to the original image and is therefore for illustrative purposes only.

The following resources for replacing copyrighted map figures may be helpful:

USGS National Map Viewer (public domain): http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/

The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth (public domain): http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/clickmap/

Maps at the CIA (public domain): https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html and https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/cia-maps-publications/index.html

NASA Earth Observatory (public domain): http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/

Landsat: http://landsat.visibleearth.nasa.gov/

USGS EROS (Earth Resources Observatory and Science (EROS) Center) (public domain): http://eros.usgs.gov/#

Natural Earth (public domain): http://www.naturalearthdata.com/

Additional Editor Comments:

Dear authors,

I know the review process has taken a long time, but we have now received reports from two subject experts. They have raised some important concerns. Please address them before we can proceed further.

[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: Partly

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: N/A

**********

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 an excellent paper and it will be very helpful for future researchers and practitioners working on occupational health or precision healthcare. Despite many strengths this paper has, there are a few areas that require clarity as well as further explanations as follows:

1. In the methods, please explain which study designs were considered eligible for inclusion. I see that you included articles by their publication types (e.g., original paper, conference proceedings, but not reviews). Future readers may wish to know if you wanted to include intervention studies or observational ones, or both. And more importantly, why such a choice was made? Please explain those in the methods. In addition, scoping reviews are generally very inclusive and they often include diverse papers, including reviews and editorials. Please explain why you did not include them, and considered protocols even if they did not have any results yet.

2. The results of the paper is very organized, and perhaps one of the best I have seen in scoping reviews. One suggestion I'd make is reflecting on the results more critically, providing comparisons and critical gaps between groups/subgroups of studies in your discussion. For instance, each sub-section of your discussion can/should provide specific research progress and gaps (which you can link with your recommendations later).

3. The idea of precision health, overall, has deep roots in recent progress in "omics"- which you mentioned in your paper as well. However, your paper may provide some reflections (in the discussion section), outlining/summarizing/criticizing the current states of "omics" deployed in existing research. Also, the growth of digitalization is transforming personalized healthcare, therefore, please discuss how such technologies are shaping precision worksite preventions, and provide specific recommendations for enhancing such applications.

4. Your recommendations are well structured- please consider adding a section for implications for policy and practice. Scoping reviews provide mapping of research that promotes further research, and perhaps more notably, inform decision-makers to leverage the available research evidence. By providing insights/recommendations for practitioners, you'll show the real-world value of the mapped evidence that can inform evidence-based practice.

Thanks again for conceptualizing and completing this beautiful review, and I look forward to seeing how this work helps scholars and communities in the future.

Reviewer #2: Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this review. The manuscript features a scoping review focused on precision prevention research in the worksite setting. I hope that the comments that follow will aid the authors in improving the potential contribution of this manuscript.

General

•While the introduction is helpful to set up the stage for the review, I wonder if authors could summarise and trim the text to streamline the key messages, particularly for the sections ‘From precision medicine to precision health’ and ‘Precision prevention’. It seems the same ideas are repeated throughout – I feel they could be combined into one section.

•Methods are well detailed and authors applied an exhaustive scoping review approach. I just lacked a few details (see the ‘specific comments’ section below).

•For Results it would be good to see a more thorough description of the interventions that were implemented. It is surprising that considering the majority of studies identified were interventions, there is so little information about them (e.g., what specific intervention techniques were employed?). Different types of feedback are mentioned, but to me this is just one of many techniques that an intervention could apply (see, for example, the 281 techniques identified as part of the Behaviour Change Techniques Ontology; Marques et al., 2023). How about the rest of techniques? How about the duration of the interventions, their mode of delivery, etc.

•Discussion: this is a long discussion section which could be also trimmed to streamline the key messages. As an example, the section on ‘study designs’ is going back and forth, presenting a multitude of review findings while it is not clear what is the point that authors want to make.

•I cannot really see the figures as they are blurred, and I cannot download the file so I have not had the chance to review them.

Specific

•Lines 26-27: “Over three quarters of the studies addressed an intervention (95/129, 74 %).” 74% is not over three quarters.

•Lines 31-32: “while multiple mentioning was possible”. Not sure ‘while’ is the best connector here. I think authors just want to say something like ‘please note’ here.

•Lines 36-37: “(Algorithms, Markov Models)” for clarity please add ‘e.g.,’ if these are examples.

•Lines 38-39: “Although there is a growing number of precision prevention studies…”. Some of the conclusions presented here do not follow from the results section. For example, the growing number of studies. Please ensure this section maps 1:1 onto the study findings in ‘results’.

•Lines 48-49: “According to the World Health Organization [1], globally, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are responsible for approximately 74 % of deaths worldwide…”. Having ‘globally’ and ‘worldwide’ in this sentence seems redundant.

•Lines 48-49: “Also, due to this complexity, the prevalence of NCDs and their associated impact on public health continue to be a major concern [8] and global public health action requires new approaches to address NCDs [9].”. The first part of this sentence repeats info already presented in the same paragraph (at the beginning).

•Line 63: “This will be achieved primarily…”. Present tense would be more indicated here.

•Line 85: “targeting health behaviors (e.g.,nutrition, physical activity, smoking)”: Nutrition is not a behaviour.

•Line 88: “will be achieved only if”, please rephrase as “will only be achieved…”.

•Line 139: “a scoping review by Viana et al. [10] presents…”. Please use past sentence to introduce findings from previous studies.

•Lines 160-161: “Therefore, future reviews should broaden the search strategy to better capture emerging sub-disciplines and focus on specific stages of individuals’ lifespans.” This seems contradictory. Should they broaden the scope or should they actually do the opposite and narrow it down to capture specific stages?

•Lines 186-187: In contrast to this lack of studies on precision prevention in worksites, Moe-Byrne et al…”. I do not understand what the point is in presenting the findings for this review focused on RCTs. How this contributes to the review and/or the overall rationale?

•Line 229: “To address the issues outlined above…” I suggest a better word-choice here. ‘Issue’ has a negative connotation (i.e., a problem).

•Line 233: “The scoping review was pre-registered on the Open Science Framework”. Authors could be more specific here and state that the eligibility criteria and the search strings were pre-registered. These are the only things I could find in the OSF page.

•Line 245: “Furthermore, a search for follow-up articles of previously published study protocols detected by the search string…”. Does this explain the two searches (May 4 and 15)? Please clarify.

•Line 252: “in English between January 2010 and May 2023”. Is there any rationale for setting up the start of the search as of 2010? Please explain.

•Line 252: “A detailed summary of the eligibility criteria, focusing…”. Could this table be included in the main text? it seems quite important to understand the review.

•Line 384: “Furthermore, we used the model of Gambhir et al. [11] to determine…”. Authors could briefly explain these different stages and include this in Methods, considering the important use of this framework to classify research in the scoping review.

•Lines 430-433: “Although there seem to be numerous studies on precision prevention in an occupational setting…” I don’t understand what is the authors’ point here. Please rephrase.

•Lines 445: “Years of publication”. I understand this is a sub-heading of ‘Study context and…’? If so it would be great to have different heading levels for clarity.

•Line 653: “Strength and limitations”. Authors should include here that, unlike screening, data extraction was not done by pairs, with the consequent risk of errors / inaccuracies in the extracted data.

•Line 731: “identifying three identified publications.” Requires rephrasing.

•Lines 736-740: “In summary, in addition to further developing precision prevention in the four points…”. These last two sentences are not clear and to me do not follow from anything that has been said in the discussion. A stronger conclusion could be to focus on the recommendations for future research.

References

Marques, M. M., Wright, A. J., Corker, E., Johnston, M., West, R., Hastings, J., ... & Michie, S. (2023). The behaviour change technique ontology: Transforming the behaviour change technique taxonomy v1. Wellcome open research, 8.

**********

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: Yes: M. Mahbub Hossain

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.

Precision Prevention in Worksite Health – A Scoping Review on Research Trends and Gaps

PONE-D-23-40011R1

Dear Dr. Friedrich,

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,

Yashendra Sethi

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Thank you for making all the edits - i can see most reviewer comments have been addressed well and hence happy to accept it. Congratulations on your contribution.

Reviewers' comments: