*Geek Box: Scoping Review vs. Systematic Review

*Geek Box: Scoping Review vs. Systematic Review

Most of you will be familiar with systematic reviews, which apply specific inclusion criteria and aim to provide assessments of the quality of the included research. Scoping reviews, however, are generally broader in their aims and not defined by narrow inclusion criteria, nor aim to conduct assessments of evidential quality.

Rather, scoping reviews are intended, as the name implies, to employ a broad “scope” and may include different types of research designs. The aim of scoping reviews is generally to “map” the scope of the available evidence on a given topic, to identify the characteristics of available studies on that topic, potential gaps in the literature, and to identify themes, concepts, and/or definitions that may be present or applied in that research area.

As all evidence has value, so it is with scoping reviews, and their value is primarily in the collation of the evidence on a given topic or question in one paper.