The paper deals with social media use during residency training in Oman. Although the paper is interesting, the authors do need to address some problems:
• In the Introduction, the statements about Twitter require citation substantiation.
• A major limitation of the study is that it was conducted in 2014/2105. A study of social media that is already five years old is severely limited in two areas, and this limitation does need to be mentioned at the end of the Discussion:
o Social media usage has changed in five years. For example, the third-highest social media platform in this study, Google+, is no longer available for usage, so is irrelevant today.
o Medical school training changes, and so the figures on whether or not the residents have been trained in social media usage are very out of date.
• FreeChat should be more clearly identified. The only system I know of is a front-end for WhatsApp, so it may be a little obscure.
• It would be useful if the authors could supply a copy of the questionnaire as an appendix.
• In Table 2, the 0-6 hours row should come below the “Average hours spent using social media per week” heading.
• Abstract: Please give the raw number of the 71% who “did not receive any course or guidance…” In fact, throughout the paper, where statistics are reported in the text, the raw number should be given, followed by the percentage (to one or two decimal points).
• The paper suffers from many minor language errors (e.g., the sentence beginning “Recently in United statue, researches…” appears to be erroneous and should be corrected; “1 hours using…” should be 1 hour using…” and many others. Sometimes these are simply irritating (requiring a re-read for understanding) and, at other times, the meaning is not clear.
• There is inconsistency in the naming of the various social media. The authors should visit the respective social media sites, establish the correct official name, and use only that name.
• After Table 4, it appears that the formatting of the text is the same as the heading; this needs to be corrected.
• The Discussion is extremely weak, and is almost entirely merely a summary of the Results. The Discussion does really need to expand upon the Results, reflecting on these in light of the literature, and trying to answer an overall question of “So what?” or “Why does this information matter?”
• “activism” is first introduced into the paper in the Conclusion. There does not appear to be a discussion of activism earlier in the paper. It should either be removed from the Conclusion, or, if it is discussed elsewhere using other terminology, then this needs clarification.
So, an interesting paper, but it is a pity that the authors waited five years before publishing their data, making the study interesting from a historical viewpoint, but questionable beyond that. The Discussion also requires substantial expansion. In addition, the manuscript does require careful proof-reading to correct many language errors.
Possible Conflict of Interest:
For Transparency: I am an Associate Editor of MedEdPublish