Supplement Use Among Athletes: Insights from Gyms in Sarajevo

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Generally speaking, the present work is highly interesting and meaningful, as well as significant. The authors try to explore the habits, attitudes, and consumption patterns of food supplement among gym users and the potential relationships with their gender, age, and training experience structure, which has been done by a cross-sentional online survey. As we expected, several valuable and impressing findings can be naturally found from this study, which would be help us to understand the importance of supplement use for gym users, and even the athletes. Given those benefits mentioned above, I believe the current manuscript can be considered to be accepted, but before this, several detailed error should be properly resolved firstly, and thank you!

1. In the section of introduction, more direct or indirect evidence should be introduced and explained to underline the underlying correlation between food supplement and exercise performance of professional athletes.
2. Ethical standards from line 124 to 128, can be moved to the section of 2.1 study design and population.
3. In all tables, the symbol p and n should be displayed with their italics form.
4. The contents of conclusion is too numerous and tedious, this section should be further refined and summarized, and partial contents can be moved to discussion section.
5. The references should be carefully and seriously checked by the authors, and some of them will be not standard.

That's all, and thank you!

Comments on the Quality of English Language

I believe the English could be improved to more clearly express the present research by authors.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1

Time is an extremely valuable resource. The authors thank you for your time in analyzing our article and for the recommendations you made. In attachment, we send the responses point by point.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The study approches  an  important  aspect  of the  sports  medicine life style . The  study  is restricted in the Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina zone  and this is a new investigation , however it could  represents at the same time, a  limit of  the  study . The  results  are in agreement with the others reports of the litterature, highlighting the poor kwnoledge of the supplementation  and the  self prescription 

In the introduction the authors should clarify better why they  hypothesized that attitudes, habits, and  usage patterns among gym-goers in Bosnia and Herzegovina differed significantly from  those reported in previous findings.

Which kind of economic and sociocultural factors are potentially  involved? Did the  authors  investigate the  education level  of the subjects  investigated ?

The  authors should eventually  clarifyed  the potential differences among female  and males in terms  of weekly work load  and injuries , if explored .  

 In any case  this  aspect can be discussed in the future perspectives . 

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2

Time is an extremely valuable resource. The authors thank you for the time you spent analyzing our article and for the recommendations you made. In attachment, we send the answers point by point.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

paper title - Supplement Use Among Athletes: Insights from Gyms in Sarajevo 

here are some comments, questions, and suggestions

in the abstract - should note why (significant of doing the study) what is the relevant of examining the habits, attitudes,.......

why this research locale ?

in the last paragraph of the introduction - author/s noted studies done in other countries, noted the gap in the research locale, could emphasize more on this, probably could provide some statistics of gym-goers or diabetic percentages in the general population - this would further strengthen the significant of doing the study

for the research hypothesis - there should be some background literature about this - as of the moment this is quite lacking - what patterns? there should be a section on this.

as the author later noted the various fitness motivation noted in table 2, there should also be some background literature on this

perhaps an overarching theoretical framework for the study - which is also currently lacking

for the instrument - why these specific demographics - there should be some sort of justification or previous studies noting the significant differences or effects on the study topic

same with section 2 and 3 of the instrument - clarification are needed, how data are collected? Likert? how they are interpret? all categorical?

validity? reliability?

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 3

Time is an extremely valuable resource. The authors thank you for the time you spent analyzing our article and for the recommendations you made. In attachment, we send the answers point by point.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

after going over the point by point revisions made by the author/s the paper is now much better

the statistics are clear and sound, and is currently adequate for acceptance