[joss-review] Feedback on draft

[musoke]

openjournals/joss-reviews#6667

The paper is much improved since the initial submission 😄

These comments are in reference to the latest draft (paper.pdf).

Writing

• The balance between summary and statement of need seems off.
  The JOSS docs ask for "A summary describing the high-level functionality and purpose of the software for a diverse, non-specialist audience." I was expecting the summary to be similar to an abstract: first and shorter.

• I would suggest adding sentences similar to the current lines 16-20 (about HERA/LOFAR/MWA and what they hope to learn) and 31-32 (your approach) to the start. Only explain details of 21cm after convincing the reader that it is interesting.

• Figure: Say explicitly that inferred parameters on the left are the same coefficients as on the right.

• Explain the quantities in the figure. Is this a power spectrum of 21-cm signal? Or hydrogen density?

• Give an equation for $\Delta^2(k) = \sum ...$ as well as the current textual descritption.

State of the field

• You briefly explain why this is a difficult task and describe your statistical techniques and implementation. I would like to see some mention of other approaches and how BayesEoR differs.
• Is there alternative software that can be cited? Perhaps from the HERA, LoFAR, or MWA collaborations.

References

• Should MultiNest be cited? It seems central to the analysis technique.

[jburba]

Hi @musoke , thanks for your suggestions. I think I've implemented them all in the latest draft. Please see the latest PDF and let me know what you think. We decided to cite a couple of existing papers using our code which provide more details on comparisons of our approach with existing approaches. The details required to compare the approaches felt a bit too technical for this paper.

[musoke]

This looks good!