Mapping evidence on factors contributing to maternal and child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa: A scoping review protocol

Ugochinyere I. Nwagbara; Emmanuella C. Osuala; Rumbidzai Chireshe; Gbotemi B. Babatunde; Ngozichika O. Okeke; Nnennaya Opara; Khumbulani W. Hlongwana

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0272335

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMay 24, 2021
21 Apr 2022 Decision Letter - Akanni Ibukun Akinyemi, Editor PONE-D-21-16423 Mapping evidence on factors contributing to maternal and child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa: a scoping review protocol PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Nwagbara et al, 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. It is okay to not include studies published in French, however, you need to justify this. Please submit your revised manuscript by June 2, 2022. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. 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We will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide in your cover letter. 3. Thank you for submitting the above manuscript to PLOS ONE. During our internal evaluation of the manuscript, we found significant text overlap between your submission and the following previously published works, some of which you are an author. - https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-104159/v1 - https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-6092/v1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2288/ - https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality - https://www.who.int./mediacentre/news/releases/2014/child_mortality_estimates/en/ We would like to make you aware that copying extracts from previous publications, especially outside the methods section, word-for-word is unacceptable. In addition, the reproduction of text from published reports has implications for the copyright that may apply to the publications. 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You may also provide optional suggestions and comments to authors that they might find helpful in planning their study. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: Dear Author, Please consider below suggestions: 1. In the introduction you have given the definition of maternal death. I suggest you give it earlier in the introduction section. 2. In the research question, actually you are searching for the gap of knowledge, and then please mention it properly and mention any potential sub-questions. 3. I do not agree with this type of writing inclusion and exclusion criteria. Actually, it is a kind of repeating the same thing. 4. Please mention the approval of the protocol and funding source. Reviewer #2: Many thanks for the opportunity to review the manuscript Mapping evidence on factors contributing to maternal and child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa: a scoping review protocol. I think the authors have develop a protocol which to certain extent meets the requirement for a scoping review protocol. I am missing the search strategy for all the databases which should be in an appendix. I also think that the suggested PubMed search is not build to capture factors contributing to maternal and child mortality e.g. I don’t see the word cause of death etc. I don’t understand why you are not including studies published in French as SSA has a huge Francophone population. For the data extraction – what do the authors mean with “most relevant findings”? For the reviewer it would be very useful if the manuscript has line numbering. Why women older than 15 years? The references used are generally very old e.g. World Health Statistics from 2016. A new report is published very year. The same with reference 9. I don’t think this review adds much to the literature as we already know why women and children are dying in SSA. ****** 7. 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Revision 1
5 Jul 2022 Author Response Author’s response to the reviews. Manuscript title: Mapping evidence on factors contributing to maternal and child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa: a scoping review protocol Manuscript PONE-D-21-16423 We are very grateful for the reviews provided by the editor and the reviewers of this manuscript. The comments were very useful. We have revised the manuscript according to the reviewer’s comments. Below is the point-by-point response to the reviewer’s comments. Please find attached a revised version of the manuscript with tracked changes highlighted in ‘red’. Response to reviewers’ queries/ comments EDITOR’S COMMENTS # Editor’s comment Authors’ responses Page and Line Number/s 1 It is okay to not include studies published in French, however, you need to justify this. We agree with the reviewer that the justification should have been provided, hence we have now provided it. In short, we will exclude non-English studies as previous studies have shown that it had a minimal effect on the overall conclusions. Page 6, Lines 114-115 2 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 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/fil es can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf We have reviewed the style requirements again and we are of the view that our manuscript is complaint Whole Manuscript 3 In your Data Availability statement, you have not specified where the minimal data set underlying the results described in your manuscript can be found. PLOS defines a study's minimal data set as the underlying data used to reach the conclusions drawn in the manuscript and any additional data required to replicate the reported study findings in their entirety. All PLOS journals require that the minimal data set be made fully available. For more information about our data policy, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability. Upon re-submitting your revised manuscript, please upload your study’s minimal underlying data set as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and include the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers within your revised cover letter. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. Any potentially identifying patient information must be fully anonymized. Important: If there are ethical or legal restrictions to sharing your data publicly, please explain these restrictions in detail. Please see our guidelines for more information on what we consider unacceptable restrictions to publicly sharing data: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. Note that it is not acceptable for the authors to be the sole named individuals responsible for ensuring data access. We have added our data Availability statement Page 11, Lines 254-255 4 3. Thank you for submitting the above manuscript to PLOS ONE. During our internal evaluation of the manuscript, we found significant text overlap between your submission and the following previously published works, some of which you are an author. - https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-104159/v1 - https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-6092/v1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2288/ - https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality - https://www.who.int./mediacentre/news/releases/2014/child_mortality_estimates/en/ We would like to make you aware that copying extracts from previous publications, especially outside the methods section, word-for-word is unacceptable. In addition, the reproduction of text from published reports has implications for the copyright that may apply to the publications. Please revise the manuscript to rephrase the duplicated text, cite your sources, and provide details as to how the current manuscript advances on previous work. Please note that further consideration is dependent on the submission of a manuscript that addresses these concerns about the overlap in text with published work. We will carefully review your manuscript upon resubmission, so please ensure that your revision is thorough. Thanks for the notification as we have carefully rephrased the duplicated texts Whole Manuscript REVIEWER ONE COMMENT 1 Reviewer #1: Dear Author, Please consider below suggestions: In the introduction you have given the definition of maternal death. I suggest you give it earlier in the introduction section. Thank you for this good suggestion, we have now moved the definition of maternal death to the earlier part of the introduction, as suggested. Page 3, Lines 49-52 2 In the research question, actually you are searching for the gap of knowledge, and then please mention it properly and mention any potential sub-questions. Thank you for this suggestion, we have now mentioned the gap of knowledge and potential sub-questions properly. Page 4, Lines 85-86 3 I do not agree with this type of writing inclusion and exclusion criteria. Actually, it is a kind of repeating the same thing. Thanks for the observation. We have re-written our inclusion and exclusion criteria in an unrepetitive manner. Pages 5-6, Lines 107-119 4 Please mention the approval of the protocol and funding source. The requested information has now been incorporated, thanks. Page 11, Line 257 REVIEWER TWO COMMENT 1 Reviewers' comments: Many thanks for the opportunity to review the manuscript Mapping evidence on factors contributing to maternal and child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa: a scoping review protocol. I think the authors have develop a protocol which to certain extent meets the requirement for a scoping review protocol. Thank for your review and comment. 2 I am missing the search strategy for all the databases which should be in an appendix. I also think that the suggested PubMed search is not build to capture factors contributing to maternal and child mortality e.g. I don’t see the word cause of death etc. Thanks for your observation. We have added a pilot search using the PubMed database and also included the word ‘cause of death’ in the search. Page 10-Lines 238-239 3 I don’t understand why you are not including studies published in French as SSA has a huge Francophone population. We have taken an approach by Reviewer One, suggesting that excluding non-English articles is acceptable, provided that proper justification is provided (please see our response to the related query by Reviewer One). Page 6, Lines 114-115 4 For the data extraction – what do the authors mean with “most relevant findings”? Upon reflection, we have released that this phrase ‘most relevant findings’ may be confusing, hence we have removed it from our data extraction form and replaced it with ‘key findings’. During the data extraction process we will include the key outcomes from each article included in the study. Page 10, Line 240 5 For the reviewer it would be very useful if the manuscript has line numbering We have inserted line numbering. Whole Manuscript 6 Why women older than 15 years? We chose this age due to the high prevalence of teenage pregnancy in SSA in this age group. The categorisation of 15-24 years or 15-19 years (in the case of studies on teenage issues) is common in scientific papers. So, we expect that most studies reporting on maternal and child health issues may rarely capture ages below 15 years. 7 The references used are generally very old e.g. World Health Statistics from 2016. A new report is published very year. The same with reference 9. Thanks, we have updated the references. Whole Manuscript 8 I don’t think this review adds much to the literature as we already know why women and children are dying in SSA. This study is trying to challenge the very dismissive perception that we know the problems in SSA and not be opened to observing the emerging trends. Greater emphasis still needs to be paid to maternal and child health issues, as these remain serious public health problems. Unless, this maternal and child health issues remain in the agenda of scientists, policy makers, advocacy groups and interventionists may easily lose sight to these important issues. . Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers Comments.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272335.r002
19 Jul 2022 Decision Letter - Akanni Ibukun Akinyemi, Editor Mapping evidence on factors contributing to maternal and child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa: a scoping review protocol PONE-D-21-16423R1 Dear Dr. Nwagbara, 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, Akanni Ibukun Akinyemi, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272335.r003
Formally Accepted
29 Jul 2022 Acceptance Letter - Akanni Ibukun Akinyemi, Editor PONE-D-21-16423R1 Mapping evidence on factors contributing to maternal and child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa: a scoping review protocol Dear Dr. Nwagbara: 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. Akanni Ibukun Akinyemi Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272335.r004

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