PMEN-D-24-00020

Experience is central and connections matter: A Leximancer analysis of the research priorities of people with lived experience of mental health issues in Australia

PLOS Mental Health

Dear Dr. Banfield,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Mental Health. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Mental Health’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 Mar 14 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 mentalhealth@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pmen/ 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 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'.

Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Vitalii Klymchuk, Ph.D., D.Sc.

Academic Editor

PLOS Mental Health

Journal Requirements:

1. In the online submission form, you indicated that "A searchable database of the dataset used in the current study is available at https://alivenetwork.com.au/mental-health-priorities/. The full dataset is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.". 

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 by return email and your exemption request will be escalated to the editor for approval. Your exemption request will be handled independently and will not hold up the peer review process, but will need to be resolved should your manuscript be accepted for publication. One of the Editorial team will then be in touch if there are any issues.

2. Please send a completed 'Competing Interests' statement, including any COIs declared by your co-authors. If you have no competing interests to declare, please state "The authors have declared that no competing interests exist". 

3. Please provide separate figure files in .tif or .eps format.

For more information about figure files please see our guidelines: 

https://journals.plos.org/mentalhealth/s/figures 

https://journals.plos.org/mentalhealth/s/figures#loc-file-requirements 

4. 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 (if provided):

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

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Mental Health’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn 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: N/A

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. 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 Mental Health 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: Thank you for the opportunity to review this interesting paper. It is well considered and logically presented, focusing on an important topic. The description of the methodological processes are rigorous and it is clear the steps that the research team took in analysing the data and its final presentation.

The final figures were a little hard to read, but the descriptions accompanying them were clear.

It is particularly important that this project takes a lived experience priority position in developing the research priorities, and this is balanced well with the views of carers. I did have a question concerning the design of the overall methodology - was this something that was also co-designed with the relevant community? This is a little unclear.

I also wondered whether those with lived experience contributed to the research overall - from design through to data collection and onto analysis. Was the community consulted for example in the final themes put forward in the analysis? If not this could be an opportunity for further study, along with understanding whether consumers and carers differed in their priorities.

Reviewer #2: Notes

- The roles of all the authors to be added in as per recent guidelines on collaborations.

- Same protocol number (perhaps generic) was found (Protocol number 2013/388) in a similar article by the same author - Mental health research priorities in Australia: a consumer and carer agenda

- Broader literature review might help - a good number of the references were self-citations - not bad in itself but limited to finding research in a lager context.

Other notes

- Good identification of socioeconomic factors as limitation

- Interesting read.

**********

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.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

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.

Experience is central and connections matter: A Leximancer analysis of the research priorities of people with lived experience of mental health issues in Australia

PMEN-D-24-00020R1

Dear Prof Banfield,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'Experience is central and connections matter: A Leximancer analysis of the research priorities of people with lived experience of mental health issues in Australia' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Mental Health.

Before your manuscript can be formally accepted you will need to complete some formatting changes.

Please also ensure you address the following:

In the methods please provide a sample size and power calculation or describe how participant recruitment was designed to ensure saturation.

-In the Discussion/Conclusions – in the limitations, please consider adding a point about whether the way in which the survey invitation was distributed (through networks of people/agencies interested in MH research) might affect the results. Could also mention here whether there are any concerns about saturation if you did not perform a priori sample size calculation

-Please provide a copy of the survey as a Supporting Information file.

-Please confirm that there are no restrictions around publishing Leximancer data

Please note that your manuscript will not be scheduled for publication until you have made the required changes, so a swift response is appreciated.

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 mentalhealth@plos.org.

Thank you again for supporting Open Access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Mental Health.

Best regards,

Vitalii Klymchuk, Ph.D., D.Sc.

Academic Editor

PLOS Mental Health