PONE-D-22-11847Effecets of five teaching methods in clinical nursing teaching: A protocol for systematic review and network meta-analysisPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Liao,

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.

• The authors should critically consider the reviewer's comment regarding the risk of bias and strength of evidence for RCTs.  
• The search strategy is not extensively addressed the different potential databases for published and gray literatures.
• They have to also show the geometry of networks to clearly understand the authors intention.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Tefera Chane Mekonnen, Master in Public Health(MPH)

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does the manuscript provide a valid rationale for the proposed study, with clearly identified and justified research questions?

The research question outlined is expected to address a valid academic problem or topic and contribute to the base of knowledge in the field.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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2. Is the protocol technically sound and planned in a manner that will lead to a meaningful outcome and allow testing the stated hypotheses?

The manuscript should describe the methods in sufficient detail to prevent undisclosed flexibility in the experimental procedure or analysis pipeline, including sufficient outcome-neutral conditions (e.g. necessary controls, absence of floor or ceiling effects) to test the proposed hypotheses and a statistical power analysis where applicable. As there may be aspects of the methodology and analysis which can only be refined once the work is undertaken, authors should outline potential assumptions and explicitly describe what aspects of the proposed analyses, if any, are exploratory.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

Reviewer #3: Yes

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3. Is the methodology feasible and described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicable?

Descriptions of methods and materials in the protocol should be reported in sufficient detail for another researcher to reproduce all experiments and analyses. The protocol should describe the appropriate controls, sample size calculations, and replication needed to ensure that the data are robust and reproducible.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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4. Have the authors described where all data underlying the findings will be made available when the study is complete?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception, at the time of publication. 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: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: 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

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above and, if applicable, provide comments about issues authors must address before this protocol can be accepted for publication. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about research or publication ethics.

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: Abstract:

1. A brief description of how the analysis was carried out must be added.

2. A description of ethics and dissemination of the results must be added as a separate heading under the abstract.

3. Abbreviations must be avoided in Abstract. Eg: VIP and PICOS

4. Keywords can be added.

Introduction:

1. Page 3, Line 42: What do you mean by negative clinical nursing experiences? Clarification is needed.

2. Page 3, Line 44: What are the unprecedented challenges faced by nurses during COVID-19. An explanation can be added before coming to conclusion.

Methods:

1. Page 5, Line 94: You have mentioned excluding English and non-Chinese literature. If you have included literature conducted only in China, kindly add the same in the title.

2. Page 7, Line 120: As per the current version of Cochrane the risk of bias tool is RoB 2 tool. But the reference that you have cited dates back to 2011. Kindly use the recent version of the risk of bias assessment tool for your systematic review. Kindly refer https://training.cochrane.org/handbook/current/chapter-08 for further information.

3. Do you have any specific reason for choosing INPLASY for registering your systematic review? Why did you not consider using PROSPERO?

Reviewer #2: The protocol developed discusses about the usage of systemic review and Network meta-analysis

Network meta-analysis (NMA) studies are used to compare and evaluate the superiority of each intervention. Understanding the concepts and processes of systematic reviews and meta-analyses is essential to understanding NMA. As with systematic reviews and meta-analyses, NMA involves specifying the topic, searching for and selecting all related studies, and extracting data from the selected studies.

To evaluate the effects of each intervention, NMA compares and analyses three or more interventions methods using both direct and indirect evidence.

There is a possibility of several biases when performing NMA. Therefore, key assumptions like similarity, transitivity, and consistency should be satisfied when performing NMA. Among these key assumptions, consistency can be evaluated and quantified by statistical tests. The author has used the Cochrane Collaboration’s tool for assessing risk of bias.

It would be good to add few points on emerging issues in NMA, including methods for evaluation of consistency.

Limitations of the developed protocol is not defined

Reviewer #3: The article entitled Effects of five teaching methods in clinical nursing teaching: A protocol for systematic review and network meta-analysis" is a good piece of work. I have some minor suggestion prior to acceptance;

1. There are some minor language corrections in the article, including typographic and punctuation errors

2. Did the authors omitted scopus? what is the reason?

3. More specific inclusion criteria shoud be mentioned

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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Effects of five teaching methods in clinical nursing teaching: A protocol for systematic review and network meta-analysis

PONE-D-22-11847R1

Dear Dr. Liao,

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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Kind regards,

Tefera Chane Mekonnen, Master in Public Health(MPH)

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: