Peer Review History
Original SubmissionApril 13, 2020 |
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PONE-D-20-10648 Addressing immediate public coronavirus (COVID-19) concerns through social media: Utilizing Reddit’s AMA as a framework for Public Engagement with Science PLOS ONE Dear Mr. He, 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. As you can see, the reviews are in general positive, But a few key issues should be addressed in your revision. I want to highlight Reviewer 2's requests for elaboration on "policy implication", "future opportunities," and some clarification of the study method such as coding scheme and justification for sample exclusion. We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by Jul 05 2020 11:59PM. When you are 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. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that if applicable you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io, where a protocol can be assigned its own identifier (DOI) such that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
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In line with the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki, we expect all research involving human participants and/or medical data to have been approved by the authors' Institutional Review Board (IRB) or by equivalent ethics committee(s). If the need for ethical approval is waived, this should be formally confirmed by a suitable committee generally before the start of the study. As the requirements of journals and institutions are becoming stricter, approval from an independent ethics committee is becoming the norm for all research studies involving human participants and/or medical information independently of how low the risks are. Please note that we reserve the right to reject any submission that does not meet these standards, which in some cases are more stringent than local ethical standards. Therefore before we can proceed further, we would require your ethics committee to formally confirm that ethical approval was not needed in this case. Please note that we do not accept retrospective ethics approval. (If approval is needed, this should have been done before the start of the study.) Please include a copy of the letter from the ethics committee as an ""Other"" file. We hope you understand the reasons behind this request and look forward to hearing from you. 3. Please provide additional information about the participant recruitment method and the demographic details of your participants. In order to enable reproducibility and replicability and assess the generalizability of your results, please provide additional information about how the AMA session was advertised. [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: No ********** 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 paper made use of the features of Reddit, which not only helped to answer people's questions about Covid-19, but also explored people's concerns and the potentials for using social media for health communication. However, 1. Line 139: the AoC "public health" is expected to be described since it enjoys high percentage of posts. 2. Line 139: it says the AoC "family" included the enquiries for symptoms etc. on behalf of the family. Why is that? will it better if the content under this category could be reallocated according to its content? 3. Line 214: Is it possible to give more information about what questions were answered by experts or participants? how to evaluate if people get the information they need? 4. Line 273: what is the nature of these generated questions? positive or negative? did the participants get what they want or more confused? 5. Line 293: if the experts only answered the initial questions, then the main advantage of the bi-direction feature of social media has not been used. Can it be improved? e.g. longer time to answer questions? or select popular secondary questions for the hosts to answer? 6. Line 298: since the hosts are doctors, it determined the questions were mainly related to health/medical concerns, which is believed part of people's concerns. Reviewer #2: This paper analyzes the way in which the general public interacted with medical doctors on a Reddit AMA platform. The paper is original and provides some potential learnings and lessons to those interested in this medium. I have organized my comments into major and minor comments: Major comments: What are the policy implications of these findings, especially given the concerns about the spread infodemic surrounding the covid-19 outbreak. The paper says it sets out to state "future opportunities" but is vague in terms of what this means. What are the specific research question this paper seeks to address? Were these questions formulated before or after the paper was written? The paper suggests that half the posts were excluded but does not say why - why would the moderator/automoderator(whatever that is)/spam filter remove so many posts? I would not use the term "discounted" in the following paragraphs and suggest instead "excluded". Page 6, not enough details were given on the coding system used by the authors or the process by which the coding was done. Did one person code or more? How? I did not understand why if someone asked about symptoms for self they would be treated as asking for symptoms for others. Seems like symptom seeking is symptom seeking, plus how do you know "asking for a friend" is really "asking for a friend"? Why compare your results to Hara et al? Why might we expect the results to be similar? There are too many tables: tables 1-3 should be combined into one table. Tables 4 and 5 were clunky and hard to read - how about a matrix or 2x2 table? "P1a + AS1+CS1" etc is indecipherable for the reader. Minor comments: The manuscript would benefit from another thorough proof read before resubmission. The version I had still had track changes on it. Page 2, line 20 presents "an" opportunity not "the" ...line 21, sentence that starts "currently" is incomplete. ...line 36, state the year. ...line 35, "had" been identified. ...The WHO declared the outbreak a PHEIC not the events. I stopped doing a thorough check typos/edits after page 2 as there were too many. Page 4, line 84 - confirming 2013 is the correct year, why then? Page 5, line 97, data are from not is from. ********** 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: MA Ke 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 to be viewed.] 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. 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Revision 1 |
Addressing immediate public coronavirus (COVID-19) concerns through social media: Utilizing Reddit’s AMA as a framework for Public Engagement with Science PONE-D-20-10648R1 Dear Dr. He, 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 for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, 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, King-wa Fu Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: |
Formally Accepted |
PONE-D-20-10648R1 Addressing immediate public coronavirus (COVID-19) concerns through social media: Utilizing Reddit’s AMA as a framework for Public Engagement with Science Dear Dr. He: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. 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. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. King-wa Fu Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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