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During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, there has been a global shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE). In this setting, cloth masks may play an important role in limiting disease transmission; however, current literature on the use of cloth masks remains inconclusive. This review aims to integrate current studies and guidelines to determine the efficacy and use of cloth masks in healthcare settings and/or the community. Evidence-based suggestions on the most effective use of cloth masks during a pandemic are presented. Embase, MEDLINE, and Google Scholar were searched on March 31, 2020, and updated on April 6, 2020. Studies reporting on the efficacy, usability, and accessibility of cloth masks were included. Additionally, a search of guidelines and recommendations on cloth mask usage was conducted through published material by international and national public health agencies. Nine articles were included in this review after full-text screening. The clinical efficacy of a face mask is determined by the filtration efficacy of the material, fit of the mask, and compliance to wearing the mask. Household fabrics such as cotton T-shirts and towels have some filtration efficacy and therefore potential for droplet retention and protection against virus-containing particles. However, the percentage of penetration in cloth masks is higher than surgical masks or N95 respirators. Cloth masks have limited inward protection in healthcare settings where viral exposure is high but may be beneficial for outward protection in low-risk settings and use by the general public where no other alternatives to medical masks are available.

Background: Reproducibility is a central tenant of research. Explicit reproducibility checks are made across different disciplines trying to assess the replication of previously published studies. We aimed to synthesize the literature on reproducibility and describe its epidemiological characteristics, including how reproducibility is defined and assessed. We also aimed to determine and compare estimates for reproducibility across different fields.Methods and Findings: We conducted a scoping review to identify English language replication studies published between 2018-2019 in economics, education, psychology, health sciences and biomedicine. We searched Medline, Embase, PsycINFO, Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature – CINAHL, Education Source via EBSCOHost, ERIC, EconPapers, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), and EconLit. Documents retrieved were screened in duplicate against our inclusion criteria. We extracted year of publication, number of authors, country of affiliation of the corresponding author, and whether the study was funded. For the individual replication studies, we recorded whether a registered protocol was used, whether there was contact between the replicating team and the original authors, what study design was used, and what the primary outcome was. Finally, we recorded how replication was defined by the authors, and whether the assessed study(ies) successfully replicated based on this definition. Extraction was done by a single reviewer and quality controlled by a second reviewer. Our search identified 11,224 unique documents, of which 47 were included in this review. Most studies were related to either psychology (48.6%) or health sciences (23.7%). Among these 47 documents, 36 described a single replication study while the remaining 11 reported at least two replications in the same paper. Less than the half of the studies referred to a registered protocol. There was variability in the definitions of replication success. In total, across the 47 documents 177 studies were reported. Based on the definition used by the author of each study, 95 of 177 (53.7%) studies replicated. Conclusion: This study gives an overview of research across five disciplines that explicitly set out to replicate previous research. Such replication studies are extremely scarce, the definition of a success in replication is ambiguous, and the replication rate is overall modest.

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