Scoping Review Guide

Before you start your research, it's important you have a clear objective, and one or more questions aligned to this.

Key Points

• Scoping reviews should have clearly articulated objective/s and question/s.
• The objective is the rationale behind why the review should be conducted. It should be clear, succinct, and convey to the reader what the study will add to the research field.
• A scoping review generally has a broad purpose and focuses on descriptive characteristics of the included studies, rather than combining and analyzing data to generate a synthesized result.
• To define an objective, think about what you are trying to understand about the topic you are reviewing.
• Once you have defined your objective, you can start putting together inclusion criteria for the review.
• Inclusion criteria are the elements or factors that must be present in each source of evidence for it to be eligible for inclusion in the review.
• To create inclusion criteria, simply break down objectives and questions into their component parts.
• You may also need to consider primary and secondary questions.
  • Primary questions directly relate to the topic and must be addressed by all sources.
  • Secondary questions provide additional or contextual information that doesn’t need to be addressed by all sources.
• You can focus your objectives by adding more elements to your inclusion criteria, e.g. adding contextual factors such as health care setting or geographic location, or a population group.

The Joanna Briggs Institute recommends the use of the PCC framework for scoping reviews, although other frameworks can also be used depending on the nature of the review. Using these types of frameworks to break down the question into discrete components can help formulate a good answerable question and also helps in the development of a search strategy. Well-formulated review questions use structured formats to improve the scientific rigor. 

Once the question is developed, do a bit of preliminary, unofficial searching to get a sense of how much is out there on your topic and what kinds of studies are available. You may need to narrow or broaden your topic. 

Too much
If searches give tens of thousands of results the topic may be too large to manage.
Try to revise the topic to make it more narrow. This may include focusing on one aspect or adding more criteria.
 

Too little
If there are less than a couple of hundred of results then the topic may be too narrow and there may not be enough results to review once inclusion and exclusion criteria are applied.
Try to revise the topic to make it wider. This may include removing some criteria.

Though not required, you should consider registering or publishing a protocol. This will help you lay out your process in detail and prevent duplication of research by others.

JBI Evidence Synthesis Protocol Template

It is a good idea to register the protocol in a publicly accessible way as this will help avoid other people starting a review on the same topic. Some common places to publish protocols are listed below. In addition, some journals publish scoping review protocols as well as completed scoping reviews.

• Open Science Framework

• Figshare

• JBI Systematic Review Register

According to the JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis, "[a] scoping review protocol is important, as it pre-defines the objectives, methods, and reporting of the review and allows for transparency of the process".

A protocol will help:

1. define clear objectives for the review
2. execute the review
3. evaluate the success of the process and results of the review
4. prevent duplication of research by others

This should be the last stage of the planning exercise once the topic is worked out and tested and the inclusion and exclusion criteria is determined.