Peer Review History
Original SubmissionSeptember 21, 2022 |
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PONE-D-22-25100Embedding stakeholder preferences in setting priorities for health researchPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Taylor, 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 Jan 26 2023 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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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 2. Please provide additional details regarding participant consent. In the ethics statement in the Methods and online submission information, please ensure that you have specified what type you obtained (for instance, written or verbal, and if verbal, how it was documented and witnessed). If your study included minors, state whether you obtained consent from parents or guardians. If the need for consent was waived by the ethics committee, please include this information Additional Editor Comments (if provided): Reviewer 1: Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper applying a discrete choice experiment to derive empirical weights for criteria evaluating research proposals. The work will be of interest to anyone involved in prioritising research spending, where evidence for personal or organisational weights is limited. I have organised my comments by PLOS One’s criteria. 1. Technical soundness The data as presented support the conclusions and the limitations are highlighted; however, I think it would be helpful to provide additional information in the Methods to help readers evaluate the limitations. Specifically: i) could you comment on the suitability of the sample size, or your target sample size, for example using a typical rule-of-thumb estimate? ii) to address response rate, could you perhaps give a sense of how many initial invitation emails were sent out, or other measure of recruitment scale? 2. Statistical methods Please could you expand a little on the statistical methods, for readers not familiar with 1000minds and PAPRIKA. As a reader I would value a summary rather than having to read the referenced paper. It wasn’t clear to me the rationale for trading only two attributes in each choice set, how the adaptive choice sets work, nor how and why the completers ended up being presented with different numbers of choice questions (or am I misunderstanding the numbers?). I would also like to see a statement of the statistical analysis used to derive the weights – for example is it basically a conditional logit, were random effects included? As written the analysis is something of a black box, which makes it hard for the reader to evaluate. 3. Clarity Overall the paper is clearly written; I have some minor suggestions and queries that might help the reader. Intro: Paragraph beginning ‘Using this framework’ – it would help to state clearly here that this paper reports the derivation of the weights, using a discrete choice experiment. That would make it clear what’s been done before, vs what this paper is – and would also make sense of the introduction of the DCE in the final paragraph, which otherwise is a bit of a surprise. Methods: Check references – for example, text gives Hansen and Ombler as 9, but it’s reference 10 in the list. Can you be absolutely clear who was excluded (the speeders?) and who were retained (the inconsistent?). Either here or in the Results. Results: Table 1: Completers, Funders, excluded – should that be 1 not 2? It’s not obvious to me how the p-value in the footnote to Table 4 relates to the p-values for Relevance and Feasibility given in the text Personally, I would prefer to see the total N for Table 5, Table 6 and the columns in Table 7 – I know it’s in other tables, or I could add them up, but it just makes life easier for the reader. There is no funder-only analysis, because of small sample size? Would be helpful to state. Reviewe 2: Thank you for the opportunity to read the paper “embedding stakeholder preferences in setting priorities for health research”. The following are comments to support the paper further. The paper is well written and was a real pleasure to read. The authors should be commended for the research, and this will likely be of interest to many readers of this journal. Title: One main recommendation is to change the title of this paper as it does not truly reflect the content. Perhaps consider more details a “embedding stakeholder preferences in setting priorities for health research: using a discrete choice experiment to develop a multi-criteria tool for evaluating research proposals.” Or “Towards the development of a multi-criterial tool for evaluating research proposals that reflects stakeholder preferences.”. The title is a tad misleading as it stands now. Abstract: No changes suggested Introduction: - Paragraph 1, please define “low value published studies”. Please consider non-colonial approaches to how value can be interpreted. - The last paragraph of the introduction may belong more in the discussion. Your last paragraph is a strong lead into the methods section, and this paragraph is someone distracting to the reader. Methods: - Third paragraph, please define consumer. - Remainder of methods was easy to follow and reproducible. The level of detail was refreshing for a DCE paper. - Only area related to the statistical analysis. Did the authors make any adjustments for multiple comparisons? Results: Very well written and presented. Discussion: Once again very well written. In the last paragraph, the authors are encouraged to consider future research that considers equity and diversity. In most research, many voices are missing at the table. This paper is an excellent beginning to have a tool to consider how embedding stakeholder preferences can happen. But the authors are encouraged to consider how weights may change based on who the stakeholders/collaborators are. Weighting of certain factors may be different, and this is an important area of future research and awareness for our academic community. Figure 1: figure is blurry and could benefit from some graphical support to ensure it is crisp. Recognize that this may only be a problem with how we are accessing the document as peer reviewers. Reviewer3: While it is interesting and valuable to undertake participatory decision processes within the clinical context, I am sceptical as to how the application of the PAPRIKA method has been done in this manuscript. In particular, the calibration of the purely ordinal performance levels into "Low", "Medium", "High" in relation to the rather abstract set of criteria that is not quite operationalised before put into concrete questions to be answered by respondents. The meaning of "Low" etc. is not really made clear and it cannot be understood beforehand to be universal between respondents, however this could be remediated by providing baselines values or anchoring values that puts the respodents on the "same page" when they answer the choice experiment otherwise the resulting weights will suffer from lack of meaning. Perhaps what could be done, but then with a fewer set of respondents, is to connect the performance labels "Low, Medium, High" to previous projects and making them more concrete for the respondents to react upon. You'd want the respondents to be aware of what the trade-off actually is about, what you get and don't get from an individual sequence of trade-offs. I am not sure about the data availability part. I know the the 1000minds platform will enable for you to access your data rather swiftly but it is unclear if the data is made accessible to other than the platform license holder in this case. [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: Partly Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Partly ********** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: I Don't Know Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: 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 Reviewer #3: No ********** 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 Reviewer #3: 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: Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper applying a discrete choice experiment to derive empirical weights for criteria evaluating research proposals. The work will be of interest to anyone involved in prioritising research spending, where evidence for personal or organisational weights is limited. I have organised my comments by PLOS One’s criteria. 1. Technical soundness The data as presented support the conclusions and the limitations are highlighted; however, I think it would be helpful to provide additional information in the Methods to help readers evaluate the limitations. Specifically: i) could you comment on the suitability of the sample size, or your target sample size, for example using a typical rule-of-thumb estimate? ii) to address response rate, could you perhaps give a sense of how many initial invitation emails were sent out, or other measure of recruitment scale? 2. Statistical methods Please could you expand a little on the statistical methods, for readers not familiar with 1000minds and PAPRIKA. As a reader I would value a summary rather than having to read the referenced paper. It wasn’t clear to me the rationale for trading only two attributes in each choice set, how the adaptive choice sets work, nor how and why the completers ended up being presented with different numbers of choice questions (or am I misunderstanding the numbers?). I would also like to see a statement of the statistical analysis used to derive the weights – for example is it basically a conditional logit, were random effects included? As written the analysis is something of a black box, which makes it hard for the reader to evaluate. 4. Clarity Overall the paper is clearly written; I have some minor suggestions and queries that might help the reader. Intro: Paragraph beginning ‘Using this framework’ – it would help to state clearly here that this paper reports the derivation of the weights, using a discrete choice experiment. That would make it clear what’s been done before, vs what this paper is – and would also make sense of the introduction of the DCE in the final paragraph, which otherwise is a bit of a surprise. Methods: Check references – for example, text gives Hansen and Ombler as 9, but it’s reference 10 in the list. Can you be absolutely clear who was excluded (the speeders?) and who were retained (the inconsistent?). Either here or in the Results. Results: Table 1: Completers, Funders, excluded – should that be 1 not 2? It’s not obvious to me how the p-value in the footnote to Table 4 relates to the p-values for Relevance and Feasibility given in the text Personally, I would prefer to see the total N for Table 5, Table 6 and the columns in Table 7 – I know it’s in other tables, or I could add them up, but it just makes life easier for the reader. There is no funder-only analysis, because of small sample size? Would be helpful to state. Reviewer #2: Thank you for the opportunity to read the paper “embedding stakeholder preferences in setting priorities for health research”. The following are comments to support the paper further. The paper is well written and was a real pleasure to read. The authors should be commended for the research, and this will likely be of interest to many readers of this journal. Title: One main recommendation is to change the title of this paper as it does not truly reflect the content. Perhaps consider more details a “embedding stakeholder preferences in setting priorities for health research: using a discrete choice experiment to develop a multi-criteria tool for evaluating research proposals.” Or “Towards the development of a multi-criterial tool for evaluating research proposals that reflects stakeholder preferences.”. The title is a tad misleading as it stands now. Abstract: No changes suggested Introduction: - Paragraph 1, please define “low value published studies”. Please consider non-colonial approaches to how value can be interpreted. - The last paragraph of the introduction may belong more in the discussion. Your last paragraph is a strong lead into the methods section, and this paragraph is someone distracting to the reader. Methods: - Third paragraph, please define consumer. - Remainder of methods was easy to follow and reproducible. The level of detail was refreshing for a DCE paper. - Only area related to the statistical analysis. Did the authors make any adjustments for multiple comparisons? Results: Very well written and presented. Discussion: Once again very well written. In the last paragraph, the authors are encouraged to consider future research that considers equity and diversity. In most research, many voices are missing at the table. This paper is an excellent beginning to have a tool to consider how embedding stakeholder preferences can happen. But the authors are encouraged to consider how weights may change based on who the stakeholders/collaborators are. Weighting of certain factors may be different, and this is an important area of future research and awareness for our academic community. Figure 1: figure is blurry and could benefit from some graphical support to ensure it is crisp. Recognize that this may only be a problem with how we are accessing the document as peer reviewers. Reviewer #3: While it is interesting and valuable to undertake participatory decision processes within the clinical context I am sceptical as to how the application of the PAPRIKA method has been done in this manuscript. In particular, the calibration of the purely ordinal performance levels into "Low", "Medium", "High" in relation to the rather abstract set of criteria that is not quite operationalised before put into concrete questions to be answered by respondents. The meaning of "Low" etc. is not really made clear and it cannot be understood beforehand to be universal between respondents, however this could be remediated by providing baselines values or anchoring values that puts the respodents on the "same page" when they answer the choice experiment otherwise the resulting weights will suffer from lack of meaning. Perhaps what could be done, but then with a fewer set of respondents, is to connect the performance labels "Low, Medium, High" to previous projects and making them more concrete for the respondents to react upon. You'd want the respondents to be aware of what the trade-off actually is about, what you get and don't get from an individual sequence of trade-offs. I am not sure about the data availability part. I know the the 1000minds platform will enable for you to access your data rather swiftly but it is unclear if the data is made accessible to other than the platform license holder in this case. ********** 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: No Reviewer #2: No Reviewer #3: 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. 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Revision 1 |
Embedding stakeholder preferences in setting priorities for health research: using a discrete choice experiment to develop a multi-criteria tool for evaluating research proposals PONE-D-22-25100R1 Dear Dr. Taylor, 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, Kekeli Kodjo Adanu, MB CHB, MPH Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Congratulations on the acceptance of your paper. Hopefully our readers and funding organizations will find it useful in the assessment of research studies. 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 #1: All comments have been addressed ********** 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 #1: Yes ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ********** 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 #1: Yes ********** 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 #1: Yes ********** 6. 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: Thank you for addressing my questions. No further comments. But I now can't submit unless I add extra characters to reach a minimum of 100.... ********** 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 #1: No ********** |
Formally Accepted |
PONE-D-22-25100R1 Embedding stakeholder preferences in setting priorities for health research: using a discrete choice experiment to develop a multi-criteria tool for evaluating research proposals Dear Dr. Taylor: 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 customercare@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. Kekeli Kodjo Adanu Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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