PONE-D-23-42926Effect of music therapy on adverse neonatal outcomes: A systematic review and Dose-Response Meta-analysisPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Shahbazi,

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.

ACADEMIC EDITOR: 

• Reviewer#1 has substantial considerations. Please, read the comments carefully and revise the manuscript accordingly. 

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 27 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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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.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Mona Dür, PhD, MSc

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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2. We noticed you have some minor occurrence of overlapping text with the following previous publication(s), which needs to be addressed:

- https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/9161074

- https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD011878.pub2

In your revision ensure you cite all your sources (including your own works), and quote or rephrase any duplicated text outside the methods section. Further consideration is dependent on these concerns being addressed.

3. In the online submission form, you indicated that [All data are fully available If requested by the editor.]. 

All PLOS journals now require all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript to be freely available to other researchers, either 1. In a public repository, 2. Within the manuscript itself, or 3. Uploaded as supplementary information.

This policy applies to all data except where public deposition would breach compliance with the protocol approved by your research ethics board. If your data cannot be made publicly available for ethical or legal reasons (e.g., public availability would compromise patient privacy), please explain your reasons on resubmission and your exemption request will be escalated for approval. 

4. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. 

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

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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: Yes

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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?

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: No

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: Reviewer comments

1. The results in abstract needs to convey more clarity.

2. “If the full text of the paper was unavailable, we received it from Sci-Hub, free paper, Research Gate, or Send an email to the corresponding author”. This line should be removed.

3. Kindly clearly clarify the primary and secondary outcomes.

4. Kindly revisit the title since it does not convey exact meaning i.e. physiological parameters are not adverse outcomes.

5. Kindly attach the filled PRISMA checklist.

6. Kindly use the PRISMA flow diagram template and redo the study flow diagram.

7. Publication bias: funnel plot should be generated and attached.

8. search strategy use may miss few of the RCTs since it advisable to screen the article manually rather than relying on the search strategy.

9. Explain the need for this meta-analysis in introduction section.

10. The search strategy gave me 306 results on pubmed itself. So I believe there are more article that can be found and made useful and increase the comprehensiveness of the article.

11. I think the statistics can be made useful if time is translated to days or hours. Giving the fractional numbers may not appeal as applicable.

12. How were the confounders accounted to highlight true results of the music therapy?

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Response to criteria:

1. The study presents the results of original research.

Response: Yes

2. Results reported have not been published elsewhere.

Response: Not sure

3. Experiments, statistics, and other analyses are performed to a high technical standard and are described in sufficient detail.

Response: Needs lot of improvement.

4. Conclusions are presented in an appropriate fashion and are supported by the data.

Response: It needs to be reframed to convey correct meaning. The results done mean improvement but change in the physiological parameters.

5. The article is presented in an intelligible fashion and is written in standard English.

Response: Yes

6. The research meets all applicable standards for the ethics of experimentation and research integrity.

Response: Yes

7. The article adheres to appropriate reporting guidelines and community standards for data availability.

Response: Not sure. They should attach PRISMA checklist.

Reviewer #2: The authors made a great effort by using dose response meta analysis by comparing to establish the link between music therapy and neonatal outcomes of O2 saturation, heart rate, respiratory rate, sleep duration, body temperature, and systolic and diastolic pressure.

This dose-response meta-analysis has provided a reinforced cause and effect relationship between music and neonatal outcomes based on the observation of studies conducted in the past years.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Anurag Fursule

Reviewer #2: No

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: review.docx

PONE-D-23-42926R1Effect of music therapy on behavioral and physiological neonatal outcomes: A systematic review and Dose-Response Meta-analysisPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Shahbazi,

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.

==============================

ACADEMIC EDITOR: The revision of the manuscript has improved its overall quality. However, Reviewer 1 has several comments which should be addressed in the revised version. 

==============================

Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 28 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,

Mona Dür, PhD, MSc

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments:

Reviewer 2 did not send any comments. However, Reviewer 1 has several comments which should be considered and addressed in a revised version.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

[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.

PONE-D-23-42926R2Effect of music therapy on behavioral and physiological neonatal outcomes: A systematic review and Dose-Response Meta-analysisPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Shahbazi,

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 05 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,

Phakkharawat Sittiprapaporn, 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.

Additional Editor Comments:

(1) The discussion part requires enhanced clarity. Please examine the composition and sequence of sentences, especially in that section.

(2) Please review Table 1, which contains the research studies included in your systematic review as well as the associated statistics. Table 1 lacks at least one of the articles cited in the reference list.

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

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: Yes

Reviewer #3: I Don't Know

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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

Reviewer #2: The meta-analysis done elaborately to demonstrate the music therapy on behavioral and physiological neonatal outcomes and the limitation. The revised manuscript has improved and acceptable for publication.

Reviewer #3: Dear Authors,

This systematic review brings highly relevant points related to music therapy and dose effect. Thank you for addressing them. It is something we need to look at in the near future for premature babies and other populations as well.

Additional comments are in a separate PDF file of your manuscript.

Overall the English narrative is clear, however it needs better clarity in the discussion section. Kindly review the writing / sentence order particularly in that section.

It will help if you kindly review Table 1 with the research studies included in your systematic review and potentially in the statistics. There is at least one article that is mentioned in the reference list, that it is not in Table 1. Please, see my comment on the PDF file.

Looking forward to your article.

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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 #2: Yes: Jagadeesh Ramasamy

Reviewer #3: 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.

Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: PONE-D-23-42926_R2 RV.pdf

Effect of music therapy on behavioral and physiological neonatal outcomes: A systematic review and Dose-Response Meta-analysis

PONE-D-23-42926R3

Dear Dr. Shahbazi,

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,

Phakkharawat Sittiprapaporn, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE