The main analysis was for GlobalSurg 1 was published online in May 2016 in BJS with the print version following in July.

Click here to read the manuscript in full 

The journey to final publication of any research study is often long as researchers strive to have their manuscript published in leading, high impact journals.

We would like to share with all our collaborators the journey the GlobalSurg 1 manuscript has been on from first submission to final acceptance by posting the anonymous peer review comments received following every submission.

There are several common strands running through the comments. Firstly, several of the reviewers were highly complimentary about the success of our global research network, but such international collaboratives are new territory in the research landscape and the collaborative model was not always completely understood by reviewers who questioned our desire to include all collaborators on the authorship list.

It was also noted that our dataset was skewed towards HDI countries as we had more centres contributing data from these countries. This is something we hope will improve in future studies as our network grows and attracts more contributions from LMIC.

A common criticism amongst reviewers at several journals was regarding the validity of data entered by so many different centres and the extent of missing data points within the dataset. This is a criticism we have accepted and sought to address in our current study, GlobalSurg 2: ‘Determining the worldwide rate of surgical site infections following abdominal surgery’. During this study we will be conducting a data validation study whereby a separate set of collaborators at each centre will check the data entered into our online data collection tool (REDCap) to ensure it is accurate and correct.

The journey of the GlobalSurg 1 manuscript took over a year from first submission to final publication – we’d be interested to hear your thoughts about this; post comments below and let us know what you think via our contact form.

New England Journal of Medicine – click here to read the comments

JAMA – click here to read the comments

British Medical Journal (BMJ) – click here to read the comments

BJS manuscript accepted – click here to read the comments

“The authors are also to be congratulated on managing to build such a wide and extensive network during this study. With an interest both from the Lancet and the World Bank in publishing data on surgery to look at trends over the next few years, such a network is essential to drive global improvement in surgical care across the world in the long term.”
“The future of global surgical development and improvement in global surgical data and outcomes assessment lies in building the infrastructure and human resource capacity, particularly in LMIC. The authors are to be congratulated for the respect their manuscript and study shows to local providers and future surgical leaders”.
“This manuscript documents a remarkable multinational effort to measure outcomes of a highly morbid set of procedures across a spectrum of Human Development Index countries”.