Dear Editor,

Thank you for the invitation to revise this manuscript.

The authors present an interesting review of journals author instructions on specific guidance on the report and conduction of systematic reviews.

They analyzed 168 journals and found a lack of guidance on how to conduct reviews on author instructions sections.

Although I find their research question interesting and within the scope of Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods, I have suggestions for improving their manuscript.

General comment
A strong premise made by the authors on the design and conduction of the study is that scientific journals should recommend specific guidelines for the conduction of systematic reviews. The authors concluded that a few journals had a systematic review tailored methodological guidance.

I’m not convinced it is the role of journals to tailor which systematic review methods should be employed by those submitting to the journals.

This is not usual for all types of scientific investigation and not only for systematic reviews. Furthermore, why should journals recommend, for instance, authors to use “Cochrane methodology”? It is worth noting that Cochrane, JBI, Campbell not only make a recommendation on how to perform a review, but they have a collaborative editorial system that produces the reviews with the authors.

I’m not sure if the standardization of methods X or Y is a good thing based on specific guidance recommendations.

First, methods change over time (how will the journals keep their recommendations updated?

Second, there is disagreement, even inside institutions, on the best methods.

This comment is regarding methodological guidelines and not reporting guidelines that journals should request.

I invite authors to better discuss this in the introduction/discussion, especially if their argument is valid only for systematic reviews or any study.

Methods

It seems authors developed a search strategy to identify systematic reviews.
" The search specifically targeted systematic reviews published between 2020 and 2021, covering a span of two full calendar years to accommodate potential publishing fluctuations throughout the year. The search query employed was: "systematic review"[Title] AND 2020/01/01:2021/12/31[Date - Publication] AND MEDLINE"[Filter]."

At the same time, they selected top journals based on the number of systematic reviews published yearly.

Why did you search for reviews in Medline and not only journals? There needs to be a report on the results of the search strategy employed to search for reviews.

Dear Editor,

Thank you for the invitation to revise a new submission to this manuscript.

I appreciate the authors' work improving the manuscript and addressing my suggestions in this revised version.

The authors made some edits to the Introduction, Methods, and Discussion that addressed some of my previous concerns. Now, it is clear that there are some limitations to recommending methodological guidance, including the fact that different sources may be heterogeneous.

Additionally, Table 5 seems an optimal resource for aiding journals in differentiating reporting from methodological guidance.

It is also clear now what the selection and inclusion process of SRs in the analysis was.

Although I'm not entirely confident that it is the role of journals to recommend methodology to authors, I see scientific merit in the analysis and value of the proposed framework in Table 5.