Title: Earning pocket money and girls’ menstrual hygiene management in Ethiopia: a systematic
review and meta-analysis
Version: 3 Date: 13 Apr 2022
Reviewer's report:
Title: Earning pocket money and girls’ menstrual hygiene management in Ethiopia: a systematic
review and meta-analysis"
Submission ID 871f9f33-4721-4911-8260-86bd7b29aad1
Dear authors your manuscript is very interesting and important for the policymaker, but the
following point should be addressed before publication.
Abstract
1. ‘School of Health Science’ or ‘college of health science’ in the author’s detail. Minor mistake
2. Why you are choosing the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) quality assessment tool for the
cross-sectional studies to assess the quality of the included study. How to assess the quality
of the included study other than cross-sectional study (case-control, cohort, comparative cross-
sectional studies, etc---). Do you think it is better than the Newcastle-Ottawa quality assessment
scale method?
3. Data extraction techniques, type of model, and tests for publication bias and heterogeneity
should be clearly described in the method section of the abstract.
4. How to justify the amount of pocket money to be earned by itself affect a girl’s menstrual
hygiene.
5. ‘‘It is critical to investigate ways to provide low-cost commercial sanitary products in order
to improve menstrual hygiene management in low-income settings’’. This recommendation is
beyond your result findings; this research didn’t show that the high cost of the material was
affecting the menstrual hygiene of the girls.
Methods
1. PRISMA 2020 checklist was available online why did the authors have used the old PRISMA
2009 checklist?
2. Even if you’re saying to follow the PRISMA guideline to write this review, the order on the
manuscript is not in accordance with the PRISMA guideline.
3. Dear authors, the last date for this systematic review and meta-analysis was September 15,
2021, better to include the studies published in the last six months.
4. Students get money from their parents for different purposes (transport, buying pens, pencils
etc….) even if the amount of money were varied that may not be used for purchasing Martials
used for menstrual hygiene. Therefore how do differentiate those students who gain pocket
money or not who used it for menstrual hygiene.
5. Do you have primary studies excluded due to the high risk of bias? What do you think about
this issue?
6. The way to test the presence of publication bias between the primary studies included in the
final meta-analysis should be described in the method part of the manuscript.
7. Why did you have used a random-effect meta-analysis technique, and why you are not used
another meta-analysis model.
Results and Discussion
1. ‘‘The sample size in this study ranged from small (n=301) [28] to large (n=828)’’ this
statement is not explanatory better to rephrase it.
2. ‘‘The included studies exhibited moderate heterogeneity (I2=66.7%, p-value=0.006). Hence,
we used a random effect meta-analysis model to estimate POR (Fig2.)’’ better to revise these
two sentences.
3. What is your reason to perform sub-group analysis using ‘sampling methods’ and method of
data collection? Do you think that these cause disparity in the outcome variable?
4. What is your explanation if publication bias has occurred between the primary studies?