
==== Front
JMIRx Med
JMIRx Med
JMIRxMed
xmed
34
JMIRx Med
2563-6316
JMIRx Med

10.2196/56047
56047
Peer-Review Report
Peer Reviews
Peer Review of “The Role of Animal-Assisted Therapy in Enhancing Patients’ Well-Being: Systematic Study of the Qualitative and Quantitative Evidence”
Anonymous
Meinert Edward
None declared.

2024
18 3 2024
5 5604703 1 2024
03 1 2024
Copyright © Anonymous. Originally published in JMIRx Med (https://med.jmirx.org)
2024
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIRx Med, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on https://med.jmirx.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.

Keywords

animal-assisted therapy
pet therapy
outcome assessment
policies
systematic study
Corresponding author for proofs393439
Planned CE AssigneeJoshua Dykas
CE Triage CompleteYes
pap2024-03-18 07:43:50
==== Body
pmc This is a peer-review report submitted for the paper“The Role of Animal-Assisted Therapy in Enhancing Patients’ Well-Being: Systematic Study of the Qualitative and Quantitative Evidence.”

Round 1 Review

General Comments

I enjoyed reading this paper [1]. In general, this is a well-written paper. There are some areas that could be clarified or expanded to improve the strength of the article. Due to the justification, the spacing of punctuation marks appears incorrect, and there are rare instances of double punctuation (periods). The use of American Psychological Association abbreviations at first use was not followed. At times, after providing an abbreviation, the full name is spelled out (eg, “AAT,” “PTSD”).

Specific Comments

Major Comments

1. There does not appear to be a Table 2, but it is referenced in the text (page 7).

2. In the Discussion section on page 15, a reference is made to effect sizes in four outcome areas, yet no effect sizes were reviewed in the article.

3. Also in the Discussion on page 15, the word “power” is used: “The increased number of studies provided greater power in assessing variance heterogeneity and potential group differences.” Unless a specific power analysis was performed (if so, it should be discussed), the word “power” could be changed to “support” to reflect a review rather than an analysis.

Similarly, on page 16, the term “meta-analysis” is used. Unless a secondary analysis of pooled data was performed, the term “meta-analysis” should be changed to “analysis.” If a secondary pooled analysis was performed, that should be defined and described in the body of the paper.

4. Page 16, Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America is noted as an organization of interest for animal-assisted therapy, as is Pet Partners. The authors may want to consider including the global organization called International Association of Human-Animal Interaction.

5. On page 17, the authors cite lack of blinding as a limitation and introduction of bias. I would be curious to know how the authors propose blinding in studies that involve interactions with animals. I strongly suggest this sentence be removed.

6. The work done by Hinic and others [2] was not a randomized controlled study as noted in Table 1. Please double-check that all studies listed are correctly labeled as randomized studies.

Minor Comments

7. Check punctuation for spacing.

8. Check all abbreviations and use abbreviations after first use is defined.

9. Check capitalizations in midsentence (page 4: “Dog”; page 7: “Unrepresentative”).

10. Page 6: “The articles should to be published in English.” Wrong tense—change to “were.”

11. Page 1: Three categories of interventions were provided in section 2.4. It would strengthen the paper to include definitions of these categories for the reader.
==== Refs
References

1. Pandey RP Himanshu Gunjan Mukherjee R Chang C The role of animal-assisted therapy in enhancing patients' well-being: systematic study of the qualitative and quantitative evidence JMIRx Med 2024 5 e51787 doi 10.2196/51787
2. Hinic K Kowalski MO Holtzman K Mobus K The effect of a pet therapy and comparison intervention on anxiety in hospitalized children J Pediatr Nurs May-Jun 2019 46 55 61 doi 10.1016/j.pedn.2019.03.003 Medline 30852256
