Published on in Vol 2, No 3 (2021): Jul-Sep

Preprints (earlier versions) of this paper are available at https://preprints.jmir.org/preprint/32954, first published .
Authors’ Response to Peer Reviews of “Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Mental Health of College Students in India: Cross-sectional Web-Based Study”

Authors’ Response to Peer Reviews of “Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Mental Health of College Students in India: Cross-sectional Web-Based Study”

Authors’ Response to Peer Reviews of “Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Mental Health of College Students in India: Cross-sectional Web-Based Study”

Authors’ Response to Peer Reviews

1Department of Pharmacy Practice, Mallige College of Pharmacy, Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences, Bangalore, India

2Department of Pharmacology, Mallige College of Pharmacy, Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences, Bangalore, India

3Department of Pharmaceutics, Mallige College of Pharmacy, Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences, Bangalore, India

Corresponding Author:

Amar Prashad Chaudhary, PharmD

Department of Pharmacy Practice

Mallige College of Pharmacy

Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences

Silvepura, Chikkabanavara Post

Hessarghatta Road

Bangalore, 560090

India

Phone: 91 9304339189

Email: pamar419@gmail.com



This is the authors’ response to peer-review reports for “Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Mental Health of College Students in India: Cross-Sectional Web-Based Study”.


The responses and changes made to the manuscript in reply to the reviewers’ comments [1,2] are below:

Major comments

  1. The novelty of this study [3] is justified in the manuscript in detail.
  2. The grammatical errors in the manuscript have been corrected.
  3. The keywords have been corrected.
  4. The Introduction part has been revised with all the relevant information provided during the data collection time in India.
  5. The literature review for this study has been expanded with relevant scholarly articles.
  6. The concurrent validity of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale with the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 scale and the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 have been compared with the available prior evidence.

Minor comments

  1. Footnotes have been provided for the abbreviations in the table.
  2. Other correlation values have been added to Table 4 along with P values.
  3. For very small P values, P<0.001 has been written.
  4. For Tables 4 and 5, the format has been corrected with clarity and written as per journal guidelines.
  5. Less scholarly journal articles have been removed and references are written as per guidelines.

Minor comment

  1. * and *** to indicate significance levels in the Abstract have been removed.
  2. GAD-7 is the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale and PHQ-9 is the Brief Patient Health Questionnaire; this is indicated clearly in the main text in addition to the footnotes of the table. Different terms for the two scales have been removed and corrected.
  3. Articles about university students regarding their psychological distress have been cited more, including Pramukti et al [4].
  4. The reference category for the categorical independent variable is indicated in Table 4.
  1. Anonymous. Peer review of "Exploring the Utility of Google Mobility Data During the COVID-19 Pandemic in India: Digital Epidemiological Analysis". JMIRx Med 2021 Sep 02;2(3):e32952 [https://med.jmirx.org/2021/3/e32952/] [CrossRef]
  2. Anonymous. Peer review of "Exploring the Utility of Google Mobility Data During the COVID-19 Pandemic in India: Digital Epidemiological Analysis". JMIRx Med 2021 Sep 02;2(3):e32953 [https://med.jmirx.org/2021/3/e32953/] [CrossRef]
  3. Chaudhary AP, Sonar NS, TR J, Banerjee M, Yadav S. Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of college students in India: cross-sectional web-based study. JMIRx Med 2021 Sep 02;2(3):e28158 [https://med.jmirx.org/2021/3/e28158/] [CrossRef]
  4. Pramukti I, Strong C, Sitthimongkol Y, Setiawan A, Pandin MGR, Yen C, et al. Anxiety and suicidal thoughts during the COVID-19 pandemic: cross-country comparative study among Indonesian, Taiwanese, and Thai university students. J Med Internet Res 2020 Dec 24;22(12):e24487 [https://www.jmir.org/2020/12/e24487/] [CrossRef] [Medline]

Edited by E Meinert; This is a non–peer-reviewed article. submitted 16.08.21; accepted 16.08.21; published 02.09.21

Copyright

©Amar Prashad Chaudhary, Narayan Sah Sonar, Jamuna TR, Moumita Banerjee, Shailesh Yadav. Originally published in JMIRx Med (https://med.jmirx.org), 02.09.2021.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIRx Med, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on https://med.jmirx.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.