Using Social Media to Identify Consumers’ Sentiments towards Attributes of Health Insurance during Enrollment Season
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The article is a description of an original way to gather information about people looking for a health insurance scheme. The title is in some way misleading, because the selection criteria for the twitter messages didn’t include criteria like ‘ACA’ of ‘marketplace’. On the other hand, for non-Americans it isn’t very clear what is the signification of ACA-marketplace. Looking for it in Google brings me to a totally other ACA-Marketplace, which has nothing to do with health insurance. I suggest changing the title of the article in something like “……..Sentiments of people seeking a health insurance scheme in de US”.
In the same way the utilization of the ACA abbreviation in the abstract must be avoided.
Section introduction, second paragraph: your aim is to identify some of the sentiments that consumers have. Not: buying health insurance (buying wasn’t one of the key words) but ‘looking for’ or ‘discussing’
Section introduction, third paragraph: I would suggest putting this text (The first objective ….etc. …..social network’) to the end of the introduction. In that way you finish the introduction with de objective of your study.
Section 2.1. Data. Suggestion for the text of the first sentence: ……..open enrolment season for ACA from November ….etc.
Section 3.1. Text after figure 1: ‘shows the most common ………….also used.’ This is the same as on page 3 and can be abandoned.
Section 5 Conclusion first sentence: I will suggest abandoning the word ‘also’ because you didn’t investigate the financial factors which may be important for the choice of a health insurance scheme.
Author Response
Comments on applsci-504065 “Using Social Media to Identify Consumers’ Sentiments towards Attributes of Health Insurance During Enrollment Season”
Reviewer(s)' Comments to Author:
Reviewer: 1
· The article is a description of an original way to gather information about people looking for a health insurance scheme.
Thank you for your comments.
· The title is in some way misleading, because the selection criteria for the twitter messages didn’t include criteria like ‘ACA’ of ‘marketplace’. On the other hand, for non-Americans it isn’t very clear what is the signification of ACA-marketplace. Looking for it in Google brings me to a totally other ACA-Marketplace, which has nothing to do with health insurance. I suggest changing the title of the article in something like “……..Sentiments of people seeking a health insurance scheme in de US”.
We appreciate the reviewer’s comment regarding the title. We changed the title to “Using Social Media to Identify Consumers’ Sentiments towards Attributes of Health Insurance During Enrollment Season”. We emphasized in the introduction that this is a study in the US, as you can see in the revised manuscript.
· In the same way the utilization of the ACA abbreviation in the abstract must be avoided.
The rule of thumb detailed by The Chicago Manual of Style is that an abbreviation should be used five or more times in a manuscript; if its mention is more infrequent, then one should cite only the unabbreviated term. As we wanted to adequately respond to the reviewers’ comment, we changed ACA throughout the manuscript to “Affordable Care Act” 9 times.
· Section introduction, second paragraph: your aim is to identify some of the sentiments that consumers have. Not: buying health insurance (buying wasn’t one of the key words) but ‘looking for’ or ‘discussing’
We changed the word “buying” into “discussing”.
· Section introduction, third paragraph: I would suggest putting this text (The first objective ….etc. …..social network’) to the end of the introduction. In that way you finish the introduction with de objective of your study.
Thank you for this suggestion. We changed the order as you suggested.
· Section 2.1. Data. Suggestion for the text of the first sentence: ……..open enrolment season for ACA from November ….etc
We added “Affordable Care Act marketplace” per your suggestion.
· Section 3.1. Text after figure 1: ‘shows the most common ………….also used.’ This is the same as on page 3 and can be abandoned.
Done. Thanks for catching that.
· Section 5 Conclusion first sentence: I will suggest abandoning the word ‘also’ because you didn’t investigate the financial factors which may be important for the choice of a health insurance scheme.
Done.
We edited the text following your comments and hope that you appreciate this revised version.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
I do not see why the authors included the “Featured Application” on the front page of their manuscript, especially since it is overlapping with the abstract.
The abstract should be revisited. Also, alphabetize the keywords.
The authors include 74 references in less than 1.5 pages. There is a single paragraph of 9 lines that includes 27 references.
The Introduction should be restructured. The authors begin with with introducing the Affordable Care Act, and the second and third paragraphs state the aim of the paper. This should be moved to the end of the section, after the literature review of the rest of the paragraphs.
The materials and methods section should be more elaborate, in order to be understandable by the non-expert as well. For example, introduce data retrieval from twitter in detail; use of quotes, case sensitive keywords, region, how spelling and accents affect the results, why these specific keywords were chosen for this study, etc.. Why was this specific time-frame selected?. These should all be included in the methods section.
Headers should be more standard. For example, rephrase “Words Associated with Switch”.
Visualization in this field is very important and increases readability. So, it would be better if the figures are colored.
The conclusions section starts with “This study suggests that other, non-financial factors, might also be important, such as sentiments that consumers have.”. This is an abrupt start and it also implies that it follows a sentence rather than being the first one of this section. Please rephrase. Also, avoid bullet points unless absolutely necessary.
Author Response
Comments on applsci-504065 “Using Social Media to Identify Consumers’ Sentiments towards Attributes of Health Insurance During Enrollment Season”
Reviewer(s)' Comments to Author:
Reviewer: 2
Thank you for your comments. We edited the text following your comments and hope that you appreciate this revised version.
· I do not see why the authors included the “Featured Application” on the front page of their manuscript, especially since it is overlapping with the abstract.
We appreciate this comment and we are not sure why this section was included in this version of the manuscript itself. We deleted it.
· The abstract should be revisited. Also, alphabetize the keywords.
We are not quite sure what the reviewer meant with “revisited”, but we did our best to edit the abstract. We alphabetized the keywords.
· The authors include 74 references in less than 1.5 pages. There is a single paragraph of 9 lines that includes 27 references.
Yes, this is the result of working through some different versions of this study, but a very valid point. We reduced references substantially from 74 to 44.
· The Introduction should be restructured. The authors begin with introducing the Affordable Care Act, and the second and third paragraphs state the aim of the paper. This should be moved to the end of the section, after the literature review of the rest of the paragraphs.
We restructured the Introduction, the aim and objectives are now in the last paragraph.
· The materials and methods section should be more elaborate, in order to be understandable by the non-expert as well. For example, introduce data retrieval from twitter in detail; use of quotes, case sensitive keywords, region, how spelling and accents affect the results, why these specific keywords were chosen for this study, etc.. Why was this specific time-frame selected?. These should all be included in the methods section.
We substantially edited and rewrote the materials and methods section to explain in more detail how the data was retrieved from Twitter as well as why specific keywords were chosen for this study and within this time-frame.
· Headers should be more standard. For example, rephrase “Words Associated with Switch”.
We changed this subheader into “Word Association”.
· Visualization in this field is very important and increases readability. So, it would be better if the figures are colored.
We replaced figures and tables by colored figures and table.
· The conclusions section starts with “This study suggests that other, non-financial factors, might also be important, such as sentiments that consumers have.”. This is an abrupt start and it also implies that it follows a sentence rather than being the first one of this section. Please rephrase. Also, avoid bullet points unless absolutely necessary.
We changed the beginning of the conclusions. We got rid of the bullet points.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have addressed the comments from the previous review round and their manuscript is significantly improved.
