PONE-D-21-27490Awareness and Perception of Malaria and Dengue at School and college level in the District of MultanPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Amjad,

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.

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ACADEMIC EDITOR:

• Reviewers have now commented on your manuscript and identified major deficiencies which must be addressed to improve the manuscript. 
• One of the reviewer have annotated the manuscript and wrote numerous comments, including the use of language, citations, methodology and ethical permissions. It is astonishing that a study conducted in a different geographic region gets ethical permission from the native place of authors.
• The questionnaire on which the whole study is based has not been provided at any place of the manuscript.
• The manuscript has been copied from a thesis and synopsis. Most of the commentary is same like thesis or synopsis. Please get your manuscript edited to remove all such mistakes.
• The cited references and write up is so poor.
• The results of only 4 questions have been written and the drawn conclusions have nothing to do with the obtained results.
• Statistical analysis is the poorest section of the manuscript. Which scores of 21 questions were used to compute correlation coefficients?
• Please respond and address each comment raised by me and the reviewers, failing to which will lead to the rejection of the manuscript.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Shahid Farooq, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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“The authors extend their appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific Research, King Khalid University for funding this work through research groups program under grant number R.G.P. 2/11/42. The authors also thanks to Deanship of scientific Research at king Saud University for funding this work through research project number no. RSP-2021/99.”

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

[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: No

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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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: No

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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

Reviewer #2: No

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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 “Awareness and Perception of Malaria and Dengue at School and college level in the District of Multan” have conducted survey and presented study related to mosquito borne diseases in Multan, Pakistan. The manuscript is well written citing appropriate references. I will suggest minor changes to improve the quality of manuscript.

1. Sentence in abstract “The results of the findings were satisfied regarding knowledge and awareness of community and university level respondents” should be written as “The results of the findings were satisfactory regarding knowledge and awareness of community and university level respondents”

2. Introduction is somehow general, it should be more specific.

3. Line 7 on page 2 includes “such as skin bleeding in the skin” which should be altered “such as skin bleeding”

4. Zoological names should be italicized e.g. Aedes aegypti

5. “Part two of the table show that maximum” should be replaced with “Part two of the table shows that maximum” line 11, page 7.

6. The percentage of the answers given by the respondents must be summarized in 1 table as done for the correlation table

7. The questionnaire must be uploaded as supplementary files

8. The objectives should be more concise and clear

9. In-text citations and references are not according to Journal style.

l0. The manuscript is based on a survey; therefore, repeating the word research again and again in the manuscript hammers the quality

11. Conclusions must be strong

12. The correlation table must be improved, Only correlation coefficients should be presented in place of significance levels and significance level be denoted by asterisk signs

13. The manuscript can be accepted after making these improvements.

Reviewer #2: i. The whole manuscript is written in the present form. Is it appropriate to present a research conducted in past?

ii. The abstract is rough/trash writing most of inappropriate things. Nothing is clear from the abstract regarding what has been done by authors, how and what are the findings. The abstract ends with the wording that correlation analysis was done. I wonder if authors are aware that they are sending this paper to an indexed journal?

iii. Abstract must be rewritten detailing all the methods and results of the study. There should be strong recommendations at the end of the abstract section.

iv. There should be some background information regarding the need of the study

v. Introduction has been written in hurry. The scientific names have been frequently used in the introduction section; however, none of them has been italicized. This depicts the level of attention given by authors to the manuscript

vi. There are no citations > 2015 in the introduction section. I would like to see most of the citations after 2015

vii. There is huge irrelevant information in the introduction section, please delete all such info

viii. There are no objectives/hypothesis given at the end of the introduction section. Please rethink that you are targeting a high impact journal and writing your paper in a lot of hurry

ix. The manuscript sections are Introduction, MM, Results and Discussion. What is research methodology? Do you think survey is a research? Please remove all such stupid words from this section

x. The paper has been prepared from a thesis and authors have no idea what they are doing. Finding a word ‘thesis’ in the manuscripts’ MM section is a sufficient reason to render a ‘REJECT’ decision

xi. I have highlighted numerous places where ‘will be used’ is written. This is again a strong reason to reject your manuscript

xii. There is no information on the questions raised/asked from the respondenats. Such studies require to present questionnaire. Please provide that

xiii. From correlation table, it seems that 21 questions were asked; however, there are only 4 described in the results section. Such studies have nothing to do with the correlation. How the correlation can be computed? Based on what?

xiv. Discussion is too long and irrelevant. Please condense it by 60%

xv. The conclusion is not based on results. There is no result that children were aware. The abstract says that health workers were also respondents, where were those?

xvi. References must be in proper format of Plos One with all scientific names italicized

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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.

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

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: Kaleem paper.docx

Awareness and Perception of Malaria and Dengue at School and college level in the District of Multan

PONE-D-21-27490R1

Dear Dr. Amjad,

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.

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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,

Shahid Farooq, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Thank you for addressing the comments of the reviewers. Reviewers have no recommended on your paper for acceptance. Therefore, your manuscript has been accepted for publication.

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

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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

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: 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

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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

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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: I have reviewed the revised version of Awareness and Perception of Malaria and Dengue at School and college level in the District of Multan manuscript where authors have addressed all my comments. Therefore, I recommend acceptance of the manuscript.

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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