1. We have amended the title of the review by omitting the phrase "during catheter insertion". This was considered appropriate as all of our included studies examined skin antisepsis throughout the in‐dwelling period of the catheters with or without including the period of insertion, and keeping the phrase "during catheter insertion" would be misleading. We have revised the text of our review from Background through to the Methods where appropriate to reflect the change.

2. Under 'Why it is important to do this review', we changed the original statements "However, in some studies within the meta‐analysis, a combination of antiseptics were used; for example, chlorhexidine gluconate was sometimes evaluated in combination with alcohol. There remain some uncertainties regarding the best agent or combination of agents to be used for skin antisepsis" to the following: "However, the meta‐analysis only evaluated chlorhexidine gluconate and povidone‐iodine as skin antiseptics, and some studies within it assessed a combination of arterial catheters as well as central and peripheral venous catheters. Some uncertainties remain regarding the best agent, or combination of agents, for use as skin antisepsis for CVCs alone . . .". This was because in this review, the studies included also used a combination of agents, and there were no studies that assessed chlorhexidine gluconate separately, so the original statements did not justify the need for this review. Instead, the new statements more clearly reflect the differences between this review and the earlier review mentioned.

3. Under 'Types of studies', we added the following statements to further define the scope of our selection of studies: "We excluded cross‐over studies due to the possible contaminating effect of one intervention over another. We also excluded studies assessing CVCs for haemodialysis, as this is covered by another Cochrane review (McCann 2010)."

4. Under 'Selection of studies', we omitted the reference to unpublished studies because we did not find any unpublished study in our search of the trials registries.

5. Under Electronic searches, we updated the CENTRAL and MEDLINE search strategies in line with the updated indexing terms in each database.

6. Under 'Data extraction and management', we have re‐written paragraph 2 to the following to reflect what was actually done in the review.

"We found a discrepancy between the number of catheter and the number of patients in most studies, and this was due to multiple catheters being enrolled in some patients. However, we were unable to limit our analysis to one catheter per participant as none of the individual studies provided the adjusted results based on one catheter per participant."

7. We have added the section 'Unit of analysis issues' to describe how we would handle cluster‐RCTs.

8. Under 'Dealing with missing data', we revised our statement to include the absolute dropout rate in our consideration in assessing the risk of attrition bias, as a number of included studies had very high absolute dropout rates. Our revised statements are shown below:

"To assess whether the dropout rate was significant, we inspected the absolute dropout rate and the dropout rate in relation to the event rates for the intervention and the comparison groups. If the absolute dropout rate was 20% or more, we judged the study to be at high risk for incomplete outcome data. If the dropout rate was lower than 20%, we used a 'worst‐case‐scenario' method . . ."

9. Under 'Assessment of heterogeneity', we revised the statement to reflect what was actually done in the review, as follows:

"We found significant statistical heterogeneity in one analysis (Analysis 4.4) and provided a plausible explanation the possible reason for heterogeneity in the form of risk of attrition bias in some included studies. We decided to still provided the pooled estimate for this analysis and separated the studies based on the risk of attrition bias in our pre‐specified sensitivity analysis."

10. Under 'Sensitivity analysis', we re‐wrote the section as follows to reflect the information that we gathered in the review and removed any mention of intention‐to‐treat analysis:

"We performed the following sensitivity analyses.

1. Best‐ and worst‐case scenarios to assess the impact of missing data, as described in the section 'Dealing with missing data'.

2. Including and excluding studies with unclear and high risks of selection bias, namely, studies with unclear or high risk for random sequence generation, allocation concealment or both.

Had sufficient data been available, we would have performed additional sensitivity analyses to include and exclude studies with methodological issues other than selection bias, such as a lack of blinding to the participants, care givers or investigators, or where blinding was unclear."

11. Under 'Subgroup analysis and investigation of heterogeneity', we added the following statement to describe the separation of comparisons into subgroups based on the solution used, in response to the referees' comments in our draft review:

"In this review, we created subgroups of comparisons based on the solution used, for example, a subgroup for chlorhexidine in aqueous solution versus povidone iodine in aqueous solution, and another subgroup for chlorhexidine in alcohol versus povidone‐iodine in aqueous solution."