marcsze
commented
6 years ago Comment 4: Finally, you need to make it clear how your manuscript differs from the previous CRC meta-analysis and why yours is a significant advance beyond that. Does the field really need another one of these studies and why?
Answer: I thought I had did this throughout the introduction. I have added the following paragraph to the intro in the hopes that it makes the reason for this more explicit.
"In comparison to the previous meta-analysis, this study significantly increases the total stool samples investigated, examines differences between stool and tissue microbiota in the context of CRC, and takes a more community centric approach rather than a biomarker focused approach to investigating commonalities across study for the microbiota and CRC severity. Importantly, this community centric approach could provide valuable insights into the importance of accounting for the community in CRC disease not previously provided by earlier meta-analysis studies [@shah_leveraging_2017]."
1)
Sometimes sentences are missing details and assume that the reader has watched you develop the story over time. As an example, the last two sentences of the Results section of your abstract come out of nowhere. I’m not sure if the last sentence is a conclusion to the paragraph or builds upon the power sentence. I really have no idea where these are coming from or where they are going.2)
Other times, your sentences are far too complex and confusing. As an example, L11-20 contains three long and complex sentences. Your focus in on stating the results and the sentences do not flow together to build a story. This gets to the first point. But also, the structure of these sentences is pretty hard to parse. Consider this sentence..."Only evenness for adenoma (P-value<0.05) resulted in a slightly increased relative risk while lower Shannon diversity and evenness in fecal samples resulted in a significant increase in relative risk for carcinoma (P-value<0.05)."First - what about evenness changed for adenoma? Why are you mixing evenness and diversity in this sentence? Risk of what? I had to read that sentence several times before I could understand what you were trying to say. Perhaps something like this would be better…“When we measured the relative risk of developing a lesion, lower Shannon diversity was only associated with an increased relative risk for the presence of a carcinoma (P-value<0.05)."I see both kinds of statements throughout the manuscript. I would like to see you go back through the manuscript and at each sentence ask:“how does this relate to the previous sentence?”does this sentence contain a single well-developed idea?”3)
Another thing I noticed in the abstract and elsewhere is you going into talking about the “role” of the microbes in tumorigenesis. Your data and results do not get at that. We are still at the level of assocation here.4)
Finally, you need to make it clear how your manuscript differs from the previous CRC meta-analysis and why yours is a significant advance beyond that. Does the field really need another one of these studies and why?