Prognostic Factors for Delayed Healing of Complex Wounds in Adults: A Scoping Review Protocol

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript is a simple presentation of a protocol that anticipates the work that will be performed in the future. The project is well worked out.

The manuscript is a simple presentation of a protocol without providing the results of the work that will be performed in the future. The strengths are: the review protocol 76 is registered on the platform Open Science Framework (osf.io/59xyb). All results obtained through the search strategy will be transferred to the EndNote 167 Web software (Clarivate Analytics, PA, USA), where duplicates will be removed. For the reading of titles and abstracts independently by the two reviewers, the Authors will use the Rayyan 169 QCRI (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Doha, Qatar.

The weaknesses are that the quality of the articles will not be systematically evaluated by critical appraisal tools such as GRADE (a discussion will be held among the reviewers about the quality of the studies).

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your careful reading and willingness to review our research protocol. We appreciate the positive comments, they are a motivation.

Although it is possible to apply critical appraisal or risk of bias assessment in scoping reviews, we follow JBI's recommendations and try to cover as many references as possible to apply our knowledge.

“Critical appraisal or risk of bias assessment is generally not recommended in scoping reviews because the aim is to map the available evidence rather than provide a synthesized and clinically meaningful answer to a question. For this reason, an assessment of methodological limitations or risk of bias of the evidence included within a scoping review is generally not performed (unless there is a specific requirement due to the nature of the scoping review aim)” (1:2124)

However, we will consider the methodological quality of the studies and only include those that have ethical approval.

1. Peters M, Marnie C, Tricco A, Pollock D, Munn Z, Alexander L, et al. Updated methodological guidance for the conduct of scoping reviews. JBI Evidence Synthesis. 2020;18(10):2119-26.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors, the reason for your review is very interesting, but I think you have several problems that you should solve:

1.       In the search strategy, section #2 relates ulcers to healing, but the objective of his article is to know the prognostic factors for delayed healing. I recommend rethinking the keywords for this section.

2.       Related to the above, it would be interesting to evaluate how many articles are left if the searches "#1 AND #3 AND #4 (y_5[Filter]" are used exclusively, in order to know the real importance of search #2 in the final result.

3.       1148 articles seem excessive to me. I recommend that you continue with the selection criteria by reading title and abstract to know how many of these articles can finally be chosen. They are publishing the validation of a search protocol and, if the initial result they defend is 1148 articles, the protocol by itself is not sufficiently justified.

In general, the reason for the review is important, but I think they should start with a specific type of ulcer (vascular ulcer, diabetic foot, etc ...) to learn and qualify the keywords that can be transferred to the set of chronic wounds.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your careful reading and willingness to review our research protocol. We appreciate the comments.

Your suggestions were very relevant, we will respond in order:

1 and 2- We thought exactly about what you mentioned, however, we obtained many results. We send the performed attempt. As it was humanly impossible to read so many articles in a timely manner, we chose to add the outcome that is healing. We made several attempts to come up with the most suitable search strategy.

3- We understand your suggestion, so we made several attempts at a search strategy, but it was the result that we came to the most sensible and we are at the stage of reading the articles in full, which is why it took us so long.

Thank you

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report