A Systematic Review of Spatial Differences of the Ball Impact within the Serve Type at Professional and Junior Tennis Players

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Respected authors

The study submitted by you ( review article ) is of good quality . My comments are 

1- if possible can the language used be in a more simplified words for the average reader to read and understand as there are many scientific jargon not easily understood by average readers 

2- Discussion can be rewritten in a more simplified pattern and language 

3- conclusion needs to be rewritten with clear positive recommendations separately after conclusion of the study 

 

Thank you 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

thank you for your useful comments, according to which we have rewritten some parts of our study.

1- if possible, can the language used be in more simplified words for the average reader to read and understand as there are many scientific jargon not easily understood by average readers 

Response 1: We agree that many names of scientific jargon are difficult to understand for the reader, we have tried to edit and explain these names more in some parts, however, these names are commonly mentioned in scientific articles related to the biomechanics of the tennis serve and therefore it is complicated to replace this text with a simplification. In addition, we have added image No. 1, where the individual axes within the coordinate system are shown, and we have also added an alternative to the text in the form of whether the ball was hit more to the right/left, etc., which is more understandable for the reader.

2- Discussion can be rewritten in a more simplified pattern and language 

Response 2: We added simplified text explaining the differences between serve types and professional and junior players. These were mainly distances related to the stability of the ball toss in individual directions and subsequent recommendations. Furthermore, we rewrote or modified some parts of the text for the discussion to make them more understandable.

3- conclusion needs to be rewritten with clear positive recommendations separately after conclusion of the study 

Response 3: We rewrote the conclusion and clarified the text and added recommendations for further research, however, on the other hand, we have to state only the findings that we gathered through a systematic review of selected studies, because we did not conduct any research and therefore our claims would only be speculative.

Reviewer 2 Report

This systematic review study investigating the influence of the serve type, gender, and experience on the ball impact location within the tennis serve is insightful. However, I have several concerns below.

 

1. Please modify the title to be more accurate, as the gender (male vs female), and experience (highly vs less) are ambiguous

2. Could authors add the significance of the FS and KS study in the abstract?

3. The authors explained the -x, -y, -z coordinates as important features for serving. Is it possible to create an example image to visualize so audiences can understand easily?

4. The authors collected the final 10 articles and did overall analysis including quite a lot of confounding factors. Could authors elaborate more on the sample data normalization across the studies and discuss the potential limitations?

5. The authors intend to perform analysis for both males and females. However, the sample size from females is too small, which makes the result less convincing. Could authors describe this in the main text?   

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

thank you for your useful comments, according to which we have rewritten some parts of our study.

1. Please modify the title to be more accurate, as the gender (male vs female), and experience (highly vs less) are ambiguous

We agree that gender and experience can be ambiguous, therefore we correct the title: “A systematic review of spatial differences of the ball impact within the serve type at professional and junior tennis players”. We have also made these changes in the text section and in all Figures (2,3,4,5,6).

 

2. Could authors add the significance of the FS and KS study in the abstract?

We rewrote the results in the abstract to clarify the main differences between FS and KS in relation to the stability and position of the ball impact. At the beginning of the abstract, we mentioned the main differences between both types of serve. Due to these changes, we reworded the abstract to be fit to 200 words.

 

3. The authors explained the -x, -y, -z coordinates as important features for serving. Is it possible to create an example image to visualize so audiences can understand easily?

Yes, we added Figure 1, which is the visualization of the directions of the global coordinate system related to the origin placed in the baseline of the court.

 

4. The authors collected the final 10 articles and did overall analysis including quite a lot of confounding factors. Could authors elaborate more on the sample data normalization across the studies and discuss the potential limitations?

We added a supplementary table, where are the raw data and their normalization and we corrected the text in the part of limitation. The normalization of the data according to the height of the subjects did not distort the data. Still, on the contrary, it was necessary due to the different heights of the subjects and thus the prevention of distortion of the results in connection with the distance of the ball impact from the origin, especially on the z-axis (vertical).

 

5. The authors intend to perform analysis for both males and females. However, the sample size from females is too small, which makes the result less convincing. Could authors describe this in the main text?   

We added the sentence in the results and limitations of our review where we stated that the differences for women could not be relevantly compared due to the lack of data

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

All my comments have been addressed properly. Please submit a clean version with a proofread.