Content Validation of the Self-Medication Scale and Trust in Online Resources: Deepening Digital Access to Health

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Introduction should emphasize the public health problems of self-medication in health care professionals more extensively. The current introduction does not answer the, "so what" question.

Line 12: "is to" is repeated twice. line 33: grammar. Lines 88-90: please clarify. Line 92: the "two essential elements" are not clear. Are they impact of AI and social networking on self-medication decisions and degree of confidence in AI based clinical assessments?  Clarify the constructs. 

Table 1: What is Edad? In Tables 1 and 3: Does the term "doctor" refer to a physician or anyone with a PhD and MD?

Table 2 presents the expert review of each item on the scale. The results are all 100%. I do not think this represents validity of the items. 

Limitations address the issue of bias in using expert evaluation. 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Could be improved. I added some lines in the review for authors' evaluation.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,
We sincerely appreciate the time and effort spent in reviewing our manuscript. We appreciate the opportunity given to us to review our article. Attached you will find the file with all the comments and the responses we have provided.
Thank you very much for your attention and consideration.
Sincerely,

Anna Bocchino

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for giving me a possibility to review this intersting manuscript. I have some suggestions which I hope to be helpful for authors to revise this manuscript.

Page 3, Line 116 and Page 4, Line 173. Please check that the numbers of participants (35 and 30) are right.

Page 4, Line 160. Non-probabilistic convenience sampling method needs reference.

Page 6. Table 2. I would like to know, which were the items. Please introduce them.

Page 6, Line 201. Cronbach's Alpha coefficient needs reference.

Page 7, Line 226. The sentence "The final instrument consisted of 26 items". However, there are 23 items in Table 2. Please clarify.

Page 8, Line 245. Which country is in question and how those cultural issues are seen in this study. Please clarify.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,
We sincerely appreciate the time and effort spent in reviewing our manuscript. We appreciate the opportunity given to us to review our article. Attached you will find the file with all the comments and the responses we have provided.
Thank you very much for your attention and consideration.
Sincerely,

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for the opportunity to participate in analysing the article

Authors should answer the following questions by adding the answers in the text

1) on lines 43 and 44 the author is missing

2) when the authors describe the construction of the scale it is important to clarify

a) why only 5 years were defined in the survey

b) Who defined the items

c) the response scale for each item

3) When selecting experts for content validation, they should clarify

a) what criteria they have defined for considering experts

the scale has 23 items sociodemographic characteristics are not part of the sample

4) How health professionals were recruited to take part in the pilot study?

5) how the questionnaire was administered?

6) Was the project submitted to an ethics committe?

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,
We sincerely appreciate the time and effort spent in reviewing our manuscript. We appreciate the opportunity given to us to review our article. Attached you will find the file with all the comments and the responses we have provided.
Thank you very much for your attention and consideration.
Sincerely,

Anna Bocchino

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

thank you for the corrections made to the manuscript sent previously

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your time, availability, and valuable comments.

Sincerely,

Anna Bocchino