| Reviewer name and names of any other individual's who aided in reviewer | Chunquan Li |
| Do you understand and agree to our policy of having open and named reviews, and having your review included with the published manuscript. (If no, please inform the editor that you cannot review this manuscript.) | Yes |
| Is the language of sufficient quality? | Yes |
| Please add additional comments on language quality to clarify if needed | |
| Is there a clear statement of need explaining what problems the software is designed to solve and who the target audience is? | Yes |
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| Is the source code available, and has an appropriate Open Source Initiative license <a href="https://opensource.org/licenses" target="_blank">(https://opensource.org/licenses)</a> been assigned to the code? | Yes |
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| As Open Source Software are there guidelines on how to contribute, report issues or seek support on the code? | Yes |
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| Is the code executable? | Yes |
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| Is installation/deployment sufficiently outlined in the paper and documentation, and does it proceed as outlined? | Yes |
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| Is the documentation provided clear and user friendly? | Yes |
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| Additional Comments | |
| Is there a clearly-stated list of dependencies, and is the core functionality of the software documented to a satisfactory level? | Yes |
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| Have any claims of performance been sufficiently tested and compared to other commonly-used packages? | Yes |
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| Are there (ideally real world) examples demonstrating use of the software? | Yes |
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| Additional Comments | |
| Any Additional Overall Comments to the Author | 1. Page 1, Lines 14-16. The authors indicate that “it is crucial to thoroughly investigate the batch effects in the dataset before integrating and processing the data”. The term “thoroughly” may be not accurate enough. The current method can alleviate the batch effects, but it can’t thoroughly solve the related problems. In addition, this work proposes a batch evaluation tool, such “reasonably evaluate the batch effects” may be more accurate than “thoroughly investigate the batch effects”. 2. In Figure 1, does the first box is “integrated datasets”? 3. Page 5, Line 168, and Page 6, Lines 169-175, the content of these two paragraphs is similar, with some redundant descriptions. It is recommended to organize and write them into one paragraph. 4. There is Table 1 in the table list, but Table 1 is missing in the main text. 5. Page 8, Discussion section, it is better to discuss the differences between the proposed tool and a similar tool “batchQC”, especially the advantages of the proposed tool. 6. Some other minor issues: Page 1, Line 22, “to do so” should be “to do it”. Page 3, Line 100, Ref. [13] should be cited when it first appears on Line 97. Page 4, Line 114 and Page 5, Line 146, “UMAP” should be given its full name when it first appears and abbreviated directly in the following text. The variable should be in italics, such as “p” on Page 4, Line 119, “H” on Page 6, Line 184. |
| Recommendation | Minor Revisions |