Title:  Prevalence and factors associated with child marriage, a systematic review
Version: 3 Date: 13 Apr 2023
Reviewer's report:
Overall: The authors addressed a very important topic that affects women overall the world.
Overall, the flow of article is good but the article needs extensive English revision.
Abstract
• Methods: please define the child marriage in this section.
• Results: what do you of education husband? Do you mean husbands education?
• Key words: It seems that violence and adolescent are not directly related to your title. Please
delete them
Methods:
• Please add the search strategy for at least one database (e.g. Pubmed) to the search strategy
section.
• One of the related MESH terms in pubmed is "marriage age". You referred to it in the keyword
section but not in search strategy. Please use also this key word and update your search.
• Why did you excluded women in refugee camps from your review? These women are a very
important subgroups of women that experience more violence and discrimination.
• Figure1: The number of article after exclusion of duplicates is 773, but in the next step in
screening phase there are 2059 articles. How can it happen? If you mean 773 article excluded,
you should show that using horizontal arrows exiting from the right side of the box not in the
main boxes. Similarly, in the box titled" Articles were added by hand search in the reference" the
total number of articles should be written in the main box (including the 7 further articles).You
can show 7 articles added by hand by using a horizontal arrow entering from a box in the right
side to the main box.
• What do you mean of scientific and trend articles? The trend articles can also be scientific.
Please clarify in method section.
• Please write the title of figure and tables in a complete form containing detailed information
about the study.
• In flow diagram stated that 7 articles added through hand search. However, in data extraction
section in the text state that 6 studies were added by searching in the reference list of articles.
Please clarify.
• In Risk of bias section stated that "Four studies determined the inclusion criteria ".It is
meaningless.  Do you mean "four studies met the inclusion criteria"?
• In Risk of bias section the explanations about the number of articles which met the criteria or
not  and other details about the validity and reliability of articles  and so on should be  deleted
from methods section and added to the results section. The only thing that you should state in
In Risk of bias section is the tool that you used to assess the risk.
• Similarly, information about the number of articles, that reported prevalence and,  …belong
to result section not methods section. Just the method of calculating the prevalence and trend
should be stated in methods section.
Results:
• In the first line of result section it is stated that you included 32 articles, however, in methods
you wrote 34 article. Please clarify.
• Line 5: instead of "in the past 3 years "please write the exact time.
• It is true that there are variations regarding the prevalence in included studies. But still
your manuscript has strong potential for a mata-analysis. Performing meta-analysis can be
very help full and provide very useful and understandable important information. To reduce
the effect of heterogeneity, please perform subgroup analysis and use random-effect model to
estimate prevalence. For example you can estimate the pooled prevalence for Ethiopia and at
the same time perform cumulative-meta analysis to understand the effect of time on prevalence.
Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis can help to identify the most heterogeneous articles and
provide s more valid estimate. You can perform meta-analysis for country with at least 3 articles.
Furthermore, you can perform meta-analysis based on continent.
• In Related factors on child marriage section all of variables should be defined and clarifies.
For example what does it mean educational response, educational husband, family type and vice
versa. What do you mean about marital type?which fom of marriage is related to early marriage?
How religion is related to early marriage? what type of religion? what regions are risk factor?
what types of husband job? and….Please explain with sufficient details about all the variables
to be meaning full and interpretable.
Discussion
• Please revise the discussion based on suggestions and revisions in results section. There is
no need to divide the discussion into subsections. It should be written very smooth .Instead of
subsections, use topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph.