Peer Review History
| Original SubmissionFebruary 7, 2020 |
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PONE-D-20-03583 Evaluation of the acceptability in France of the vaccine against papillomavirus (HPV) among middle and high school students and their parents: a prospective, multicenter departmental and descriptive survey PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Huon, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. ============================== ACADEMIC EDITOR: The title of the manuscript should be modified in Evaluation of the acceptability in France of the vaccine against papillomavirus (HPV) among middle and high school students and their parents ============================== We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by May 10, 2020. When you are ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that if applicable you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io, where a protocol can be assigned its own identifier (DOI) such that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
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Please amend your current ethics statement to address the following concerns: Please explain why was written consent was not obtained, how you recorded/documented participant consent, and if the ethics committees/IRBs approved this consent procedure. 3. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Partly ********** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No ********** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: No ********** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The manuscript provides an interesting insight on knowledge and acceptance towards HPV vaccination in French male adolescents and their parents. However, some revisions are required. 1. Abstract. “Being discouraged by their parents and parents thinking that their child is not at risk were arguments cited and significantly associated with a willingness to be vaccinated.” Is it correct? It’s in contrast to what it is stated in the results section, line 101-102: “Conversely, factors impeding HPV vaccination for the children were: being opposed to vaccination in general (p < 0.001) and when it was discouraged by their parents (p=0.003).” 2. Introduction. It would be useful to compare the HPV vaccine schedule in other UE countries in this section, not only in the discussion, to give the reader an idea of the European context. I would also suggest elaborating on why the “climate of distrust in regard to vaccination in France” still persists. 3. Methods. Why did the authors conduct only univariate analyses without performing logistic regression analyses? It is well known that the associations coming from univariate analyses only describe two quantities, and therefore they are not particularly meaningful to describe relationships. 4. Line 95-126. It is difficult to follow the text going back and forth from children’s responses to parents’ responses. Would it be possible to also synthesize the information in a table, distinguishing parents’ replies from the children’s ones? 5. Line 148-149. “We were able to show that approximately 2/3 of the responders were either opposed or hesitant to the lack of information regarding the virus and the vaccine due to the lack of information regarding the virus and the vaccine”. What is evidence to substantiate this? Line 113-115 report that “A lack of knowledge regarding the vaccine, fear of the secondary effects, and the fact that the subject was not raised by the treating doctor were the most often cited arguments, although they were not significant”. 6. Discussion. What is a possible explanation of the lack of information claimed by the surveyed parents? Is it something consistently reported in France? Or in Europe? 7. Discussion. To more substantiate the background for these results, I would suggest including references to other research conducted on vaccine hesitancy, in particular the work of WHO SAGE Working Group on Vaccine hesitancy, and other studies dealing with the same topic. Relevant papers may include the following: - Napolitano F, D’Alessandro A, Angelillo IF. Investigating Italian parents’ vaccine hesitancy: A cross-sectional survey. Hum Vaccin Immunother 2018;1–8. - MacDonald NE, the SAGE Working Group on Vaccine Hesitancy. Vaccine hesitancy: Definition, scope and determinants. Vaccine 2015;33:4161–4. - Napolitano F, Napolitano P, Liguori G, Angelillo IF. Human papillomavirus infection and vaccination: Knowledge and attitudes among young males in Italy. Hum Vaccin Immunother. 2016;12(6):1504-10. - Dubé E, Gagnon D, Ouakki M, Bettinger JA, Witteman HO, MacDonald S, et al. Measuring vaccine acceptance among Canadian parents: A survey of the Canadian Immunization Research Network. Vaccine 2018;36:545–52. 8. Line 160-163. Please be careful not to repeat the results in the discussion section. 9. Line 269-278. These conclusions do not relate to the findings of this study. Consider perhaps moving these concepts to the discussion part and replacing the conclusion with an appropriate synthesis of the results. Reviewer #2: The authors present the results of a survey to assess the acceptability of HPV vaccination in men, among middle and high school students and their parents in the Loire-Atlantique department, France. Understanding the attitudes and perceived efficacy regarding HPV vaccination in men is pivotal to develop and provide effective programs and to establish health policies to increase the awareness of the risks associated with HPV infection and promote the vaccination. I find the topic of this study is of potential interest to the international scientific community, but it has major pitfalls that have to be overcome before the acceptance. I think the main issue of the paper is the extremely low participation rate (1.4% for parents and 1.6% for students), a major limitation that undermines the validity of this study and suggests that the obtained results could not be representative of a wider population. Abstract It would be better understood if the summary was shown in a structured way (Background, Methods, Results, Conclusion). Please, add the study period in the methods. Introduction Page 3, line 1, use the abbreviation of HPV for the first time and then throughout the manuscript (e.g. line 3, line 7, etc.). Methods I suggest to delete the paragraph: “The target populations of the study were comprised of grade 4 and grade 3 middle school and high school students attending schools in the Loire-Atlantique department (HPVac_child) and their parents (HPVac_parent).”. It is redundand. I suggest to add the school grade (4 and 3) in the first paragraph. I suggest to move and to incorporate the paragraph about the study objectives at the end of the introduction. Page 5, lines 16 and 17: I suggest to delete the criteria for non-inclusion. The authors should mention whether or not an incentive was offered for completion of the questionnaire. Were study participants assured for confidentiality? Please, clarify. The survey questionnaire was validated by a pilot study. It is not given any information regarding any modifications in the questionnaire after the pre-testing study. If any, what was the extent of the modifications? The question remains as to the selection and representativeness of the population in this study. The selection bias would have affected the external validity in terms of generalizing the findings to the wider population, and I am not sure if the attempt of the authors to minimize the selection bias was enough. There might be a large generalizability problem. All of the abovementioned issues suggest serious study limitations that should be addressed in the Limitations section. It would be helpful to have a copy of the questionnaire that was used in the appendix. Statistical analysis The statistical analysis is not adequate and incomplete. It would be very useful to generate and present the results of a logistic regression analysis, since it would give more robustness to the results. Discussion I believe the Authors have posed an effort to adequately characterize the acceptability of HPV vaccines among middle and high school students and their parents in France. But, as I mentioned earlier, it would be also interesting exploration of the potential associated factors through a multivariate data analysis techniques. I suggest to expand the literature review to generate a better structured discussion. The following papers have to be cited and commented: Hum Vaccin Immunother. 2014;10(9):2536-42, Hum Vaccin Immunother. 2016 Jun 2;12(6):1504-10, Hum Vaccin Immunother. 2016;12(1):47-51. I suggest to add a comment about potential determinants of vaccine hesitancy, e.g. according to the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunization. The following studies have to be cited and commented: Bianco et al. Vaccine 2019;37:984-999 and Napolitano et al. Hum Vaccin Immunother. 2018 Jul 3;14(7):1558-1565. The study findings showed that the treating physicians and the school doctor were the two most often cited sources of information. I suggest to discuss more thoroughly the pivotal role of healthcare providers in promoting HPV vaccination in different setting and in specific risk groups. I suggest to cite and comment other studies (e.g. Napolitano F, et al. PLoS One. 2018 Mar 29;13(3):e0194920; Landis K et al. Vaccine. 2018 Jun 7;36(24):3498-3504; D’Alessandro et al. Hum Vaccin Immunother 2018;14:1573-1579; etc..). In the limitations of the study, the authors did not mention the main limits of the cross-sectional survey. I suggest you have a fluent, preferably native, English-language speaker thoroughly copyedit your manuscript for language usage, spelling, and grammar. ********** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. 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| Revision 1 |
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Evaluation of the acceptability in France of the vaccine against papillomavirus (HPV) among middle and high school students and their parents PONE-D-20-03583R1 Dear Dr. Jean-Francois, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Nelly Rwamba Mugo, M.D Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ********** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The manuscript is now suitable for publication. All the reviewers' requests have been addressed. No further revision is needed. Reviewer #2: (No Response) ********** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No |
| Formally Accepted |
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PONE-D-20-03583R1 Evaluation of the acceptability in France of the vaccine against papillomavirus (HPV) among middle and high school students and their parents Dear Dr. HUON: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Nelly Rwamba Mugo Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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