Transcript for:
How to Conduct a Scoping Review

hello my name is Gayle Davison and I'm a first year PhD student at Queen's University Belfast this is a short video to outline how you would embark on and complete a scoping letter surely within this video I hope to give you the tools to try and complete the literature review I hope to outline the definitions and show you why you would use a scoping review discuss the evolution of scoping review literature I'd line the six step methodological framework look at really how you can start the scoping of you go through each step and I've lined some practicalities within the literature there are a number of definitions Col Cahoon defines a scoping review as a form of knowledge synthesis that addresses an exploratory research question aims of mapping key concepts and types of evidence to outline the gaps related to the defined area or field by systematically searching and selecting and synthesizing existing knowledge so why should you use a scoping review well a literature review is a form of secondary research where you're checking information that it's already captured usually by primary research there are many different types of literature reviews and I not be able to go through all of them today but what I will look at is the scoping review versus a systematic review within the literature there are many different comparisons of the systematic review and the scoping review really a systematic review looks at a very focused question like the effectiveness of a treatment air versus treatment be on treating a certain illness usually the protocol of a systematic review outlines what you will do err priori now a protocol for a scoping review well I plan what you can do but because of the edit of nature of the review then it can't be modified as you go on within systematic review usually there's a quality check on each article that you include within the systematic review usually gets quantitative data that you're looking at but some do include qualitative data data extraction is normally quite detailed and as I said the question within the systematic review is the effectiveness of treatment day versus treatment B it's usually quite clear-cut then to compare a scoping review the topic that you're looking at within a scoping review is usually quite broad and exploratory and this is why it lends itself to a lot of social sciences research and to a lot of educational research the inclusion and exclusion criteria and the protocol a lowered set prior to commencing the review it is yet flexible and it can be changed as you go along modified post hoc there isn't normally a quality assessment on each article that's included because that's really not the priority within this gokhan review you do take some quantitative data but this is minimal and usually it's qualitative data that you're looking at the scoping review doesn't aim to capture every single bit of evidence that's out there it aims more to map what's out there and to identify gaps it can be used as the initial review before embarking on further research or a can be used as the entire research project and usually within a scoping review the question is a bit broader and a bit more exploratory so you know what is known about this and when you're embarking on a scoping review usually there's three things you have to consider you need to consider the population the concept and the context so the scoping of you it's quite new one of the first articles that came out was in 2005 but from then the number of scoping reviews that have been published has written exponentially and this is because of the usefulness of it when you're going to embark looking at a topic that you're not familiar with there's not much that has been written on it or published on it and it hasn't really been explored very much before and this is the type of review that you should use I am ARC's Qian Malley published a paper in 2005 but other researchers and scholars have came along and said that really we needed a wee bit more detail because those who were reading scoping reviews weren't sure what this really meant other publications that you may like to look at would be Levac : and Joanna Briggs Institute reviewers manual for the purposes of this presentation I would like to concentrate on the first three publications that I've stated these publications have led to me creating this generic protocol that you can then use to form the basis of your review and I'd like to talk about the six step methodological framework in short number one defining the research question number two finding relevant articles number three study selection number four taking the data out of the articles number five clearing and summarizing reporting the results on number six the consultation exercise for me presenting this to you and you may just be embarking on this you may be a novice and it's probably easier for me to explain what steps I took within my own research I completed a project scoping review that looked at children's experiences of healthcare and I used this as the basis for my Master's dissertation and that was a master's in clinical education so I'm gonna take you through the steps step one so I was interested in what are children and young people's experience of health care and the reason why I was interested in this is because not much was known about it and a lot of articles that were published were from adults namely parents and health care professionals so this is my sort of starting point children young people were my population the concept was experience and the context was health care so I went to MEDLINE and completed a pilot search and went through all the five hundred and fifty articles and I ended up with 30 articles that I thought were relevant to my research question to my topic and my purpose I remember my purpose was really to improve health care for children through their own experience so after gathering these articles I had a light bulb moment and you'll find that when you're working through your scope curve you will come upon these light bulb moments and that's really the basis of your iterative refinements to what you're going to do next sometimes you have to take a step back and go back to step one to refine your research question refine your search strategy going through these articles I thought to myself well we really need to set down definitions here I mean what are children and young people what age should there be what is experience what am I talking about and what is health care does it have to be in hospital does it happen to be in a health center does it have to be when there's a health care professional there I moved from the initial research question of what are children and young people's experience of health care then to thinking about what are children young people's experience of health care from their present perspective and the out of words their redefined sort of the inclusion and exclusion criteria so from there is very important I did not want to capture evidence from parents voices or capture evidence from a healthcare professional with voices I didn't want to know what the parent thought the child's experience was I wanted to know what the child's experience was from their own perspective present is also relevant as well because within the literature adults were commenting on their experience as a child and sometimes this was 3040 years after so I wanted to know what the children's experience were at that time this then had further implications for the inclusion exclusion criteria why moved on then to complete further searches finalized my search and then run the search through MEDLINE web of science Scopus sonow Ambus I came up with 994 articles the databases that you select will depend on your topic so that led me to gather 120 articles that were relevant I had a number of articles that included adults and children a number of articles that included to burn some children and healthcare professionals that gave me another light bulb moment and I realized that actually the articles that included children as patients and adults as patients that didn't really concentrate on presenting their findings of children most of the findings within an papers were from the adult patients rather than the children and young people I decided right I will not exclude all papers that have adult patients within them the other thing was within the findings of each article there would be findings that were written by the authors themselves and there would be findings that were from the parents sometimes the authors would comment on the participants said or the participants thought and I didn't want children young people's experience that was amalgamated as in the parent and the child sought this I wanted their own experience so that led me to think about taking the quotations I done indeed that's what I did I decided I only wanted papers were they had children and young people's quotations within it and that would give me a very rich data set for my qualitative analysis further on down the line by checking these articles only that led me to gather 89 articles where there were children and young people from the ages of 0 to 18 commenting on healthcare where they had direct contact with a health care professional and that there was children young people's own quotations reference to them themselves so now I went to chart the data I'm charting the data is when you go to each paper and you take out what's relevant and you take out what will target your iam and your objective what you're really looking at so most coping reviews you're going to take out the country that the paper was published from and the Year general sort of data I also took out the age range of the children and as well I looked at the quotations and I completed qualitative analysis on 30 articles night it was difficult for me because I had 89 articles and usually with most scoping reviews you might want to end up with 20 or 50 articles so it was a large number some of the papers within the scope Merv you do say that you can set a date when you will not include any more articles because I completed this for a master's dissertation then it wasn't possible for me to analyze all 89 so I ended up taking out the quotations from only 30 articles and this is acknowledged as a limitation this led me to the findings within my Master's dissertation which you can access on research case so high when you start embarking on your scope immunity well I would suggest construct a research protocol of intent and this is what you are going to do so even if you're not sure it doesn't matter just put down pen to paper how many reviews you're going to have what databases you're going to go three and as you go on and as you learn a wee bit more about your topic you might decide to change this and this is your iterative refinements and that's okay when you're setting a protocol obviously you have to acknowledge your limitations so if you're completing a master's there might only be yourself as the lead researcher you'll obviously have a supervisor but there might may be any more people on the research team so variances as I described in my master's or planned activities which differ from that which is recommended and I have set here within this generic protocol in the slides to follow what I feel is recommended from the first three articles that I mentioned when you do complete your scope in your view and you put it within your dissertation and submit it it's best within the dissertation to comment on non adherence to a protocol as researchers we're embarking on researching a topic we try and do this as best we can but there are difficulties along the way and Nona Terence to your protocol as you said I have to do may be expected let's go to step one Nessa's I feel the most important step and this is identifying the research question when you're identifying the research question you really have to define a question by combining a broad question with a specific context of inquiry so this is looking at your population your concept and your context and try and put pen to paper really get doing what you mean by these try and be quite Pacific when you are putting down your research question you always have to think of the rationale for conducting the study and then specify as well the purpose of the study a lot of research is done because well that would be interesting to know that would be really interesting to do but maybe there's a paper right there that has already looked at this maybe there's a paper right there that's already should have concluded what you're trying to find out really think how will this help how will your research be of benefit how will it have impact you also need to look at what I put you want from the study so within my study I wanted children young people's voices within their quotations and that was the outputs you also have to review and consider refining the research question including the terms within it as you've defined after the piloting process and after identifying relevant articles so the next stage is identifying relevant articles and hopefully a lot opticals to the library and plod through a lot of books usually a lot of searching is done on databases so it's very important to seek advice and guidance from your subject librarian so as you see on the left-hand side this is the generic protocol that I mentioned and on the right hand side this is the possible variances that you may have after getting advice from a librarian you also have to think what is your experience of completing a scoping review and the legend sure does say those researchers need to have some experience in completing a scoping review but if you're a novice you can't help but so that might be a variance for you that you don't have much experience doing this your supervisor might have some experience also I think it's very important to do the piloting exercise on my piloting exercise I gathered five hundred and fifty articles and ended up having 30 relevant articles this then has implications for your research question your search strategy and your definitions also you need to as I said modify their search strategy and if you feel as if you're going through completing your scoping review and you haven't modified your research question and you haven't motivated your search strategy then you need to think why you haven't done that if you are limiting your scope and you're narrowing in on a specific thing within your topic then you need to acknowledge the limitations of this and you need to acknowledge why you're doing it and then once you've got your final version of your search strategy you need to run the search on your primary database other databases different functionality so you'll not be able to just copy and paste your librarian will help you with running your primary search through the other databases to gather all the articles you may consider searching the internet for relevant articles you may consider searching relevant networks and organizations and you will be able to add any that were previously known to you as well you may consider including grey literature which are like white papers conference proceedings and theses this does take a lot of time so you need to think hi this is going to help your research you might consider hand searching relevant journals and you might consider hand searching the reference lists of the relevant articles but for each thing you do you need to consider you know why am i doing it because every step takes a lot of time once you've got all your articles you need to import these onto a reference manager this could be Mandalay or some other reference Lunger and you need to exclude the duplicates a lot of reference managers will exclude these for you but a lot of time there are something that you need to do manual for the variances I've listed on the right hand side this could be that you don't have much experience in it this could be that you decide not to include grey literature and this could be that you decide not to Han search so now we move on to stage 3 which is study selection this is when you've got all your articles this could be maybe a thousand articles and you're going to select the ones that are relevant to your research question and then really answer your research question so you need to decide on an inclusion and exclusion criteria and you need to decide on this before you go through your articles but because of the iterative nature of a scoping review this can be modified and you can't include further detail as you go along you might decide to set a deadline for which no more studies would be included and you might decide to use two reviewers it might be difficult for you if you're completing this as a master's to have two years not many supervisors would go through a thousand articles book they might decide that they can and that's good if your supervisor is unable to go through all the articles then you might consider pairing up with someone else who's doing a similar exercise they can look at your articles under and you can look at there's no second review your isn't always needed but in a lot of recent publications and indeed in the Joanna Briggs manual they have said that it is necessary to have two years but there are arguments for and against you also need to acknowledge the iterative nature of the review and when you're stipulating your inclusion exclusion criteria you really need to have that beside you when you're going through the articles time and time again and always looking should this be included and if not why and update your criteria as you go on then after going through a number of articles you do need to meet up with your supervisor and think right am i really answering the research question do I need to change the research question do I need to refine the search strategy and that'll help progress your review if an inclusion of an article is questionable then you need to review this article with maybe the second or year or your supervisor or both if there is a disagreement then it is valuable to have a third year's opinion if that's an option for you after going through all the articles and including and excluding you then need to present this information on a Prisma flow chart for the articles that you have reviewed you need to stipulate really for the articles that you've excluded you need to step you Liat why you have excluded these so variances here might be that you don't have a second reviewer might be that you don't think it's necessary to set a deadline or know other articles are to be included and you might decide to meet with another researcher as well as your supervisor so step four is charting the data and this is where you're going to extract the information within the literature it talks about data charting form not signs as if it's a physical form so it may be that you decide to use a physical form I used Excel so once you've constructed the data charting form with your supervisor then you need to extract information from what's recommended which is ten studies and then go back over it after going back over it you might decide to refine the form you might decide well this isn't really needed and it's not aligned with the e/m and the purpose of the research or you might decide to include other things within the form what is recommended is two years as well at this stage but this could be a variance for you because you don't have two years so it just depends after upsetting your form then you need to take all the data that's required out of each article go through each article and captures so now we move on to step 5 which is analysis clearing summarizing and reporting the results stage 1 of this analysis you should complete basic numerical analysis and this is usually done on an Excel spreadsheet that's not normally anything more than that and the reason for doing this is just to show the extent the nature and the distribution of studies so usually what would be captured would be the year of publication the countries of origin the number of participants may be the ages on whatever you feel is relevant to your readers it may be looking at your final results you also need to complete qualitative content analysis and usually this is basic somatic analysis then stage 2 reporting your results and producing the outcomes and always look back at your overall research question and at your aims and objectives to ensure that these are answered CH 3 then you need to consider what is the meaning of the findings how do they relate to the overall purpose of the research and what's the implications then for future research practice on policy step 6 is the consultation exercise and not a lot of scoping your views actually complete this exercise or if they do complete it sometimes it's published separately and the reason for this is a scoping your you steps one to five is an enormous bit of work to then go and complete a focus group which would take submission for ethics then as an additional amount of work however lavaca says that the consultation exercise is essential if you are going to embark on the consultation exercise you need to establish what is the purpose of this exercise but then the literature they say that you're going to take the things to the stakeholders and that could be the primary population that you were looking at or it could be another group that you feel is affected by your research before you do this you to compile your preliminary findings and this is used as the foundation to inform really the content of what you're going to talk about within the consultation exercise you need to think about who I'm going to include in this consultation exercise or it might be variety or participants from a variety of populations you need to outline how the data is going to be collected and analyzed this could be by audio recording which is then transcribed and you need to consider incorporating opportunities for knowledge transfer so this is when you're able to sort of educate in a way the participants within your consultation exercise which might be aligned with the purpose of your research the last step is then to complete the consultation exercise and analyze your data we've been through the six steps within scoping review methodology from my experience of completing a scoping review I would say that above all a text I'm usually scoping reviews are completed within three months if there's a full-time researcher working on so a full-time researcher doing about 40 hours a week if you're a part-time researcher and by that I mean you may be doing about sixteen hours a week then I would say it would take six months one of the the big things that you need to consider is just talking to people and it was very difficult for me to verbalize my initial thoughts and because you're afraid of criticism from others but it doesn't matter if you're criticized and I'm talking really helps so as I said talk to people that you see every day I talk to people at home or if there's someone that's leading the research within the field that you're looking at then talk to them because possibly you're completing this on a part-time basis and you're coming in a night and off your work then you need to keep a journal and I think I think this is very valuable because you have a lot of thoughts and have a lot of reflections and a lot of considerations and a week later when you come back to your desk and try and pick up where you left off it'll take some time to pick up a wee bit of momentum so keeping a journal or a research diary is really important when you're writing your dissertation and if that's what you're doing or maybe you're writing a paper if after you complete the last sentence that make Mead you may be good to jot down a few bullet points or what do you think you should write next and that'll help with the flow try and keep organized for this I used Microsoft Office applications I find one no 2016 really handy where I could include links and screenshots of my search strategies and citation lists here's a list of my references these are only some of the references and there will be further references available searching through the databases or if you want to look up my scoping review workbook and you can access this from research games just by request just send me a request and send it on to you you can also look up my Master's dissertation and that'll show you maybe I to write out your review finally I just want to say thank you for listening and below this and sound at this stage an enormous amount of work it is really enjoyable so it's important that you enjoy it thank you