PONE-D-24-08686Occupational Dust Exposure Assessment and Control Tools: A Scoping Review ProtocolPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Kabito,

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Pisirai Ndarukwa, Ph.D.

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

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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: Partly

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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: No

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

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Reviewer #1: Yes

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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 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: The manuscript under review contains the key components and framework for a productive scoping review mapping existing evidence-based tools for occupational dust exposure assessment and control worthy of consideration for publication.

Overall, there are many strengths to the submission, and the authors should be commended for their proposal of this timely review.

As regards to primary concerns, the following are recommended for consideration:

Across the protocol, I would recommend that greater clarity be given to how the prospective tools are framed: does the tool need to be both an assessment AND a control tool for occupational dust exposure, or can the tool fulfil only one of these functions? If there exists a tool for assessing occupational dust, but it does not contain an element or component for controlling dust, will it still be considered for inclusion (and vice versa)? There are implications of this decision from the title, through the abstract and in particular through the methods section (especially search strategy – currently reads as if you are search for one OR the other, does not have to be both). If a tool must do both assess and control, this will need to be made more explicit in the methods section. Suggest providing an operational definition for what an occupational dust assessment / control tool is

The authors are encouraged to reflect on the purpose and utility of this scoping review once completed – ambiguity appears at various points in the introduction through to the review question. In particular – is this scoping review to map the tools available and the methodologies associated with the literature utilising said tools (as it reads from line 110-114) or is it to examine the evidence to identify evidence that supports the decision-making process for selecting tools (implied in line 83-87, and line 104-106). To simplify, is the review to map the tools that exist or to map the evidence around decision making process for selecting tools or the efficacy of the tools? If it just presenting the tools, as the questions currently read, it is unclear how this will provide the foundation for clear guidance and evidence on the process through which workers etc select the appropriate tools. It can present which tools are being used where, and perhaps what evidence supports their efficacy (if RQ1 is expanded to include this), but it does not extract evidence around the selection process of the tools themselves.

Suggest considering expanding RQ1 to include what the evidence is for either a) the effectiveness of the tools and / or b) the implementation challenges (process evaluation-type variables) associated with using the various tools.

Within methods, suggest parsing out population and context (line 119) into separate paragraphs as you have stated you will use the PCC framework and further develop and clarify the nuances between each of these components, clearly articulating what will be included/excluded under each heading. Table 1 appears incongruent, as it is now ‘problems, concept, context’. Suggest revising to be consistent. With regards Table 1, if dust is extensively searched in concept 1, then adding it to some of the terms in concept 2 (tools) is redundant. The final search at the bottom of table 1 does not appear to be correct, and needs revising – is the final search [1 and 2 and (3a or 3b) and 4]? If so, the two lines above appear superfluous.

It is interesting to read that the authors are proposing to follow both JBI and PRISMA requirements for scoping reviews, and this is slightly confusing to the reviewer. For instance, the framing of the approach under the methods heading from line 115-118, and the methods heading from 135-140 appears redundant and should be clarified – are the approaches complementary or can one be adopted more wholeheartedly?

The development of the search strategy appears fairly adhoc – was there any formal structure used to guide this development? Would there be scope to audit using established tool, such as PRESS guidelines (McGowan et al., 2016) to ensure rigour? Regarding the strategy itself, the fields for the pubmed search strategy have not been specified across each of the lines (in particular 1). There are no MeSH terms specified in 1, have these been considered? Are any date limiters going to be used? Language or other filters? Provide clarity here. There appears to be a discrepancy between Table 1 brainstorm of terms and the search in PubMed, consider aligning. Running this search in PubMed yields a few errors (in particular line 2), but still produces only 166 results. Are you confident that this search will yield sufficient results? This reviewer wonders if the terms around the tools are too specific or maybe overlapping (line 2-3). Search strategy for additional databases and details around searching grey sources would be recommended to include (in particular, how will you search in google scholar).

Through study selection – clarify whether you mean two independent reviewers means that their decisions will be blinded from each other.

It is unclear which types of study designs will be included – assuming it is all quantitative methodologies of tool assessment, but will you also include qualitative evaluations of tools? This should be made explicit within the protocol.

Figure 1 is not needed in a protocol paper and should be removed.

While it is acknowledged that a risk of bias appraisal (quality appraisal) is not always required in scoping reviews, they can be called for in certain instances. In this proposed review, as RQ2 seeks to map the methodologies and approached reported for evaluating occupational dust exposure assessment and control tools, it is recommended that a formal tool be employed to assess the methodological quality of the included studies as this would lend additional rigour and context to the answer for RQ2. If both qual/quant studies are to be included, suggest perhaps the MMAT (Hong 2018)?

Regarding data extraction tool, it appears that what is presented might only apply to RQ1, what data regarding RQ2 will be extracted?

Final minor comments: recommend revising the entire manuscript to ensure the proper tense throughout for a protocol paper, at times ebbing between past (line 86) and future (line 110, for example). Line 139-140 is confusing and requires revision.

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Reviewer #1: No

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Evidence-based dust exposure prediction and/or control tools in occupational settings: A scoping review protocol

PONE-D-24-08686R1

Dear Dr. Kabito,

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.

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Kind regards,

Pisirai Ndarukwa, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

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: Yes

**********

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

**********

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

**********

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: 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

**********

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: The authors are commended for their thoughtful consideration of feedback provided, and wished every success with the completion of the review.

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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

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