My Declaration:- The paper that I reviewed is an already published paper, so there may not be many comments as it is already peer-reviewed prepublication.

Overall this is a good paper assessing the most important area of reproductive health which is emergency contraception utilization but there are areas to be improved in the sampling method, results section, discussion with regard to contrasting findings in comparison to other studies and limitations in exhaustively mentioning limitation of the research. My constructive feedbacks with clarifications are given below

Comments on abstract, title, references

The aim of the study is clearly documented The finding of the study and how they did it is clearly documented The title is long and can be rewritten in short as “ Predictors of utilization of emergency contraception among Mizan- Tepi university students, Southwest Ethiopia” The references are relevant, recent, referenced correctly and appropriate studies are included.

Comments on introduction/background

What is already known about the topic is clearly documented The research question which is to assess factors associated with emergency contraception is clearly outlined

The research question is not justified as the authors documented there are similar researches, done in different regions of Ethiopia to assess factors associated with emergency contraception utilization among university students. References numbered 14,15,16,17 and 20 are similar research topics done in Ethiopia. The research gap is not identified or not convincing to undertake this research. The justification given on the significance of doing this research is that because it was not done at Mizan-Tepi university and this justification is not a strong one.

There is logical progress in the introduction There is no knowledge gap, as there are many studies done in Ethiopia to answer the same research questions. So the knowledge gap is not genuine. The structure of writing is optimal

comments on method section

The process of subject selection is clearly documented Sample size calculation, the process of subject selection is clearly documented and I think it is good that they did multistage sampling but it would have been good if the researchers did stratified sampling from each year of the students for the reason that 1st-year student will not have the same experience and knowledge about emergency contraception, so all years should have a chance to be equally selected based on stratified sampling. so there could be selection bias

The variables are defined and measured appropriately The variables are well defined especially the knowledge assessment and attitude variables need an explanation of how they are measured and I think they are well explained

The study methods method measured what it intends to measure(valid) and reliable There is enough detail to replicate the study

comments on result section

The tables are clearly presented but the figure (Fig 1) is totally incorrect and not relevant, for example, the first item “lack of knowledge on emergency contraception” is documented as 55% but actually it is 59/66(89.4%). All the other items in Fig 1 are totally wrong. So the figure should have been corrected. It would have been good the mean score of attitude scale was reported

Appropriate units, rounding, and number of decimals reported Titles, columns, and rows labeled correctly and clearly. Categories grouped appropriately
The text in the results are not repetitive

I am not clear about what is a statistically significant result because the exact p-values are not documented in the table but rather those which are statistically significant are mentioned as a footnote. It would have been good if the exact P-Values are documented in Table 6 I am clear about what a practically meaningful(clinically significant) results

comments on discussion section

It would have been good if the discussion part was started with the utilization of emergency contraception since this is the main objective of the research

Those results which had contradicting results and explanation for their contradiction with other findings were not reported, rather results that are similar to the other studies were reported. Reporting bias?? The conclusion answers the aims of the study and they are supported by results.

The limitations of the study are documented and they are not fatal but the knowledge assessment based on knowledge index and attitude assessment based on a mean score is not the standard, so this could have been mentioned by researchers as part of limitations. opportunities to inform future research are well outlined at the end of the conclusion.