Peer Review History
Original SubmissionAugust 31, 2021 |
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PONE-D-21-28285Interclutch variability in egg characteristics in two species of rail: is maternal identity encoded in eggshell patterns?PLOS ONE Dear Dr. McRae, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has considerable 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. The reviewers' comments can be found below. The changes required are relatively minor. Please submit your revised manuscript by Nov 22 2021 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:
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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 paper is very well written and methodologically sound. It makes novel contributions and presents promising results regarding the use of pattern matching and statistical analyses to assess intra- vs inter-clutch variation in multi-year samples of eggs of two bird species. The discussion of results also describes how such analyses may lead to the detection of potential instances of conspecific brood parasitism, re-nests and return breeders without the need for genetic or more detailed observational studies. Methodologically the paper is sound and generally easy to follow, although the sequence of steps described in some sections, such as "Spatial and temporal analysis of King Rail matching results", could in my opinion be more clearly, concisely and unambiguously conveyed by replacing or augmenting the prose with a diagram such as a flow chart or some pseudo-code. Implementation decisions, such as "we used the top 8 matches", are justified in the text, but it would be good to conduct at least some rudimentary sensitivity analysis to determine whether the analyses that were performed are highly dependent on such choices. A little more analysis regarding the impact of confounding factors such as differences in photographic and image processing across the different years, as well as differences in sample sizes, would also have strengthened the assertions made in the paper. Figures 3 and 4 are very useful in clarifying the spatial and pattern similarity linkages, but a few more detailed exemplars of matched egg images would have been helpful. Reviewer #2: This is well-conceived research project about an interesting topic. It was cleverly and meticulously carried out, with both the methods and statistical analyses thoroughly described. The comparison between moorhens and rails added substantially to the authors arguments. My only suggestion is to explain symmetrical and non-symmetrical matching the first time it is mentioned in the text--it took me a couple of read-throughs to understand what that meant. ********** 6. 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Revision 1 |
Interclutch variability in egg characteristics in two species of rail: is maternal identity encoded in eggshell patterns? PONE-D-21-28285R1 Dear Dr. McRae, 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. Sincerely, Charles R. Brown Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: |
Formally Accepted |
PONE-D-21-28285R1 Interclutch variability in egg characteristics in two species of rail: Is maternal identity encoded in eggshell patterns? Dear Dr. McRae: 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. Charles R. Brown Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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