Knowledge, attitude, and practice of pharmacy professionals on generic medicines in Eastern Ethiopia: A cross-sectional study

Ammas Siraj Mohammed; Nigist Alemayehu Woldekidan; Fuad Adem Mohammed

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0235205

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionOctober 24, 2019
19 Feb 2020 Decision Letter - Joseph Telfair, Editor PONE-D-19-29738 Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Pharmacy Professionals towards Generic Medicines, Eastern Ethiopia: A Cross-Sectional Study PLOS ONE Dear mr Mohammed, 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. We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by Apr 04 2020 11:59PM. 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. 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Please note while forming your response, if your article is accepted, you may have the opportunity to make the peer review history publicly available. The record will include editor decision letters (with reviews) and your responses to reviewer comments. If eligible, we will contact you to opt in or out. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Joseph Telfair, DrPH, MSW, MPH Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements: 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at http://www.plosone.org/attachments/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and http://www.plosone.org/attachments/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. Please provide additional details regarding participant consent. 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We noticed you have some minor occurrence of overlapping text with the following previous publication(s), which needs to be addressed: https://www.jbclinpharm.org/articles/assessment-of-knowledge-attitude-and-practice-of-pharmacy-professionals-toward-generic-medicines-northern-ethiopia-mekelle-a-cross-3923.html In your revision ensure you cite all your sources (including your own works), and quote or rephrase any duplicated text outside the Methods section. Further consideration is dependent on these concerns being addressed. 5. We suggest you thoroughly copyedit your manuscript for language usage, spelling, and grammar. If you do not know anyone who can help you do this, you may wish to consider employing a professional scientific editing service. Whilst you may use any professional scientific editing service of your choice, PLOS has partnered with both American Journal Experts (AJE) and Editage to provide discounted services to PLOS authors. 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[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 ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 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 ****** 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: 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: This is an interesting study to uncover the knowledge, beliefs and attitudes among pharmacists in Ethiopia and other related professionals, about the value of generic drugs. The approach and methods are well described. The authors should describe the pharmacy practice system at the beginning, so that the results are put in the context of pharmacy practice and can be better interpreted. In the discussion, there should also be a more thorough explanation of the 'so what' and the next steps. In general, there are many grammatical and typographical errors that needs to be corrected, and the formatting should be improved. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). 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Revision 1
13 Apr 2020 Author Response Editor(s)’ decision and comments 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. Our answer: thank you for your consideration of its merit and offer. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Our answer: thank you. No change in financial disclosure 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 Our answer: thank you. It is not applicable Response to editor 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at http://www.plosone.org/attachments/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and http://www.plosone.org/attachments/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf Our Answer: Thank you for this comment. The revised manuscript version is formatted in strict adherence to PLOS ONE’s formatting guideline, which obtained from above URL address, including file naming, font size for each section, spacing and other required format. 2. Please provide additional details regarding participant consent. In the ethics statement in the Methods and online submission information, please ensure that you have specified whether consent was written or verbal/oral. If consent was verbal/oral, please specify: 1) whether the ethics committee approved the verbal/oral consent procedure, 2) why written consent could not be obtained, and 3) how verbal/oral consent was recorded. If your study included minors, please state whether you obtained consent from parents or guardians in these cases. Our answer: Thank you for rising this point. Since the study participants are expected to read and write, written informed consent was obtained from all subjects before proceeding to query, which was approved by ethical review committee. During the informed consent process, study participants were assured that data collected would be used only for stated purposes and would not be disclosed or released to others without the consent of the participants. All study participants was adults, pharmacy professionals. 3. Please include copies of the survey questions or questionnaires used in the study, in both the original language and English, as Supporting Information, or include a citation if they have been published previously. Our answer: Thank you for this comment. The questionnaire used in this study is not published anywhere, but the literature we derived it from were adequately cited and it is provided as supplementary material both in local language and English upon submission. 4. We noticed you have some minor occurrence of overlapping text with the following previous publication(s), which needs to be addressed: https://www.jbclinpharm.org/articles/assessment-of-knowledge-attitude-and-practice-of-pharmacy-professionals-toward-generic-medicines-northern-ethiopia-mekelle-a-cross-3923.html. In your revision ensure you cite all your sources (including your own works), and quote or rephrase any duplicated text outside the Methods section. Further consideration is dependent on these concerns being addressed. Our answer: thank you for rising this point. We have checked the manuscript for any possible overlapping text to different source including the one you have indicated above and the obtained overlapping text were rephrased and synthesized using authors’ specific language 5. We suggest you thoroughly copyedit your manuscript for language usage, spelling, and grammar. If you do not know anyone who can help you do this, you may wish to consider employing a professional scientific editing service. Our answer: thank you for this comment. After copyediting the manuscript thoroughly, we have tried to address all typographical and grammatical errors in the manuscript. The grammatical and typographical errors within manuscript was addressed in collaboration with my colleagues 6. Your ethics statement must appear in the Methods section of your manuscript. If your ethics statement is written in any section besides the Methods, please move it to the Methods section and delete it from any other section. Please also ensure that your ethics statement is included in your manuscript, as the ethics section of your online submission will not be published alongside your manuscript. Our answer: we have moved the ethics statement from declaration section to method section of the manuscript. 7. We note you have included a table to which you do not refer in the text of your manuscript. Please ensure that you refer to Table 2 in your text; if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the Table. Our answer: we have included citation of table2 in the text prior to the table as per your recommendation. Reviewers comment and decision 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 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes 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 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. Response to reviewer Reviewer #1: This is an interesting study to uncover the knowledge, beliefs and attitudes among pharmacists in Ethiopia and other related professionals, about the value of generic drugs. The approach and methods are well described. The authors should describe the pharmacy practice system at the beginning, so that the results are put in the context of pharmacy practice and can be better interpreted. In the discussion, there should also be a more thorough explanation of the 'so what' and the next steps. In general, there are many grammatical and typographical errors that needs to be corrected, and the formatting should be improved Our answer: thank you for your appreciation and offer. Pharmacy practice system is described at the beginning of manuscript including its relation with generic drug utilization and we have tried to put and interpret the result in context of pharmacy practice system. In discussion, we have included that what should be done per our each finding and at the end of discussion, future direction for studies that will be conducted on the area. After looking the manuscript thoroughly, we have tried to address all grammatical and typographical errors in manuscript and the revised version of manuscript is formatted in strict adherence to PLOS ONE’s formatting style including naming of file. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235205.r002
11 Jun 2020 Decision Letter - Joseph Telfair, Editor Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Pharmacy Professionals on Generic Medicines in Eastern Ethiopia: A Cross-Sectional Study PONE-D-19-29738R1 Dear Dr. Mohammed, 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, Joseph Telfair, DrPH, MSW, MPH Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235205.r003
Formally Accepted
1 Jul 2020 Acceptance Letter - Joseph Telfair, Editor PONE-D-19-29738R1 Knowledge, attitude, and practice of pharmacy professionals on generic medicines in Eastern Ethiopia: A cross-Sectional Study Dear Dr. Mohammed: 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. Joseph Telfair Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235205.r004

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