Please leave your comments for the authors below Dear authors,

Thank you for the opportunity to review this protocol. Here are my suggestions for its improvement: 1. Please provide full search strategies for all databases you will use not only MEDLINE. Additionally the search provided is OVID for Medline, yet the authors state they will use PubMed for MEDLINE. Additionally, lines S9, S10, S11 could perhaps also be changed to include different endings of those words. Finally, the search lists the 31/01/2017 as the end date of the search. If this is true, please list this in the methods, and state if the review has already been started or will be conducted in regards to the publication of this protocol. Finally will the language limitations be included in the search strategy, or will be exclusion criteria. 2. Please specify if the deduplication will be handled manually or using Mendeley. 3. Please specify which database(s) will be used for discovering studies that have cited the chosen studies 4. Please specify if screening will be handled using excel, Rayyan or similar software. 5. As some of the listed authors are also authors of systematic reviews on improving the reporting quality, a note about the updates of those reviews would be welcomed in comparison to the choice of conducting a scoping review. 6. You mention: “All findings will be published in peer-reviewed journals. “ Do you foresee more than one publication regarding the scoping review. If so –details should be provided. 7. You cite A systematic scoping review of adherence to reporting guidelines in health care literature, yet claim No scoping review on this subject has been performed so far. So would suggest rephrasing that sentence and specifying the differences.

In hopes may comments can help you improve your protocol, Kind regards, Mario Malicki

Please leave your comments for the authors below Dear authors,

Thank you for the opportunity to review this updated protocol. Here are my final suggestions:

1. the following sentence should be rephrased to make it clear that this is the authors opinion, perhaps urgent is a too strong a word: Given the low levels of completeness of reporting in health research observed (10) and the urgent need of taking further actions to mitigate this problem, performing such a scoping review is warranted.

2. The search will start in early May 2017. As this is July, perhaps clearly state the dates when the search was performed.

3. Authors still list in the text and in table 2 that MEDLINE is searched via PubMed (line 137), yet they present the search via OVID.

4. Just to clarify my previous comment - I felt it would be advisable that the authors comment why they feel a scoping review will add more knowledge then updating the systematic reviews of guideline adherence they have previously conducted/participated in.

In hopes may comments can help you improve your protocol, Kind regards, Mario Malicki