METRICS – KAP Studies

APJCP receives many manuscripts describing or studying the initial/interim reports of KAP results.  There are unrepresented variations in reporting quality and structure of these manuscripts bringing many uncertainties in the peer review process.  In the light of such a variation, there is a need to develop a consensus-based guideline for an objective quality improvement/assessment for authors as well as reviewers, and editors evaluating these reports and manuscripts.

Specific objectives: 

• To develop, validate and publish a valid, reliable, and consensus-based guideline for authors reporting KAP study results.
• To provide an objective tool to evaluate manuscripts reporting KAP studies
  

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The road map to develop this tool (as a quality assessment instrument for reviewers and a quality improvement guideline for authors) includes six steps. A core working committee will develop an initial draft and a scientific committee consisting of editors and scientists the field of natural compound and in-vitro studies will comment, evaluate, and improve the initial draft. The whole process of the development is consisted of 6 steps (detailed below). The core working committee involved in providing the first draft, managing scientific committee’s consensus and finalizing the guideline. In addition, three independent reviewers/editors are involved in step 5 (evaluating the reliability of the tool). The details of all steps are listed as follows:

• Step one: A core working committee of four experts will develop the first draft of the checklist going through the following steps:
  1. Comprehensive review of available relevant quality assessment tools
  2. Extracting important and relevant items from these tools and adapting these items in order to develop the guideline’s specific items.
  3. Developing new specific items which may not be covered by previous tools.
  4. Holding several rounds of Delphi and online meetings to finalize the first draft of the tool.
• Step two: After developing the first draft, we will form a “scientific committee” including at least 10 editorial experts from different countries, various journals and international societies. The core working committee will collaborate with scientific committee members to obtain their comments and suggestion for draft item using a pre-define electronic form which aims to:
  1. Assessing the current items of the first draft of this tool, regarding some criteria such as CVI, CVR .
  2. Suggest any correction or revision to current items
  3. Suggest any new items to be added to the first draft
• Step Three: After collecting the scientific committee comments on the draft, the core working committee will provide a first final draft to be presented in an online meeting with all scientific and core working committee members to discuss on this version after a mini-workshop (to describe the consensus procedure) to evaluate face validity. At the end of the meeting, all final corrections will be made and the semi-final version will be approved.
• Step Four: For psychometric and tool reliability evaluation we will conduct an online survey of at least 50 reviewers on the semi-final version of this tool a written comments and opinion if available. All questionnaires will be collected and summarized by analysis software along with qualitative content analysis of open written comments. Considering the results of this step, this tool will be revised again by the core working committee and a new revised tool will be developed.
• Step Five: In this step, we will conduct another online survey including 30 previously accepted and 30 rejected manuscripts (preferably from other journals rather than APJCP). All these papers will be assessed by three independent reviewers using our new revised tool. The data will be analyzed to calculate inter-observer reliability. If any item could not obtain enough reliability score, it will be revised or removed by a consensus between these three reviewers and core working committee members.
• Step Six: The final revise this tool will be provided to prepare the final version of this tool. Inviting scientific committee members, another online meeting will be held and all final changes are presented in this meeting. At the end of this meeting, the final tool will be approved by all members of both committees (core working and scientific). The final tool, along with the results of this multi-phase study will be published by authorship of all both committee members and three independent reviewers.

The Core working group team:

The lead Contributor:

Dr. Fatemeh Zarei, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Health Education and Health Promotion, Faculty of Medical Sciences, Tarbiat Modares University.

The Core Committee members:

Dr. Arezoo Dehghani,  PhD, Department of Health in Emergencies and Disasters, School of Public Health and Safety, Shahid-Beheshti University of Medical Sciences.

Aram Halimi , MSc, Deprtment of Epidemiology, School of Public health, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences.

Alireza Mosavi jarrahi, MSPH, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief,  Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
Prof. of Epidemiology, Medical School, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences.

Maryam Alaradi, PhD, Health Education, Royal College of Surgeons In Ireland Medical University of Bahrain, Bahrain

Interim Scientific Committee Members:

Dr. Fatemeh Zarei, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Health Education and Health Promotion, Faculty of Medical Sciences, Tarbiat Modares University

Alireza Mosavi Jarrahi, MSPH, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief,  Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
Prof. of Epidemiology, Medical School, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences

Amorat Ratansiri,  Department of Community medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Khon Kaen Universtity, Khon Kaen, 40002, Thailand

Dr. Sunil Raina, M.D; FIAPSM, Professor & Head, Community Medicine
In-Charge Multi Disciplinary Research Unit, Director Centre for Advancing Tobacco Control in Himachal Pradesh (CATCH)
Dr. RP Government Medical College, Tanda (HP), Harcharan Orator IAPSM, National Convener Organized Medicine Academic Guild
Chief editor Journal of Public health and Primary care,
Associate Editor Journal of family medicine and Primary care
Advisor, Covid Action Group & World Health Network
Member expert committee ICMR- Centre for non-communicable diseases

Maryam Alaradi, PhD, Health Education, Royal College of Surgeons In Ireland Medical University of Bahrain

Dr. Sherzad Ali Isamel,  Professor of Community Medicine and Public Health, Head of Faculty of Public Health, Kurdistan Board of Medical Specialties, Erbil, Iraq.