Scoping Reviews for Health Sciences and Medicine

Data extraction or ‘charting the data’ is the process of extracting the relevant data from the included studies in a standardised manner. The ultimate purpose of charting the data is to identify, characterize, and summarize research evidence on a topic, including identification of research gaps (Aromataris, et al 2020).
 

Colquhoun and Levac update 2014 make the following recommendations for charting the data 

• The research team should collectively determine which variables to extract in order to answer the research question. 
• Charting should be considered an iterative process in which reviewers continually extract data and update the data charting form. 
• Reviewers should pilot the charting form on five to ten studies to determine whether their approach to data extraction is consistent with the research question and purpose. 
• Contextual or process-oriented data may require a qualitative content analysis approach.

A  comprehensive data charting form or table should be used to extract relevant information and JBI Reviewer’s Manual suggests this should be piloted at the protocol stage to record the key information such as the examples below.

• Author(s) 
• Year of publication 
• Origin/country of origin (where the source was published or conducted) 
• Aims/purpose 
• Population and sample size within the source of evidence (if applicable) 
• Methodology / methods 
• Intervention type, comparator and details of these (e.g. duration of the intervention) (if applicable). Duration of the intervention (if applicable) 
• Outcomes and details of these (e.g. how measured) (if applicable) 
• Key findings that relate to the scoping review question/s. 

JBI Recommendations for the extraction, analysis and presentation of results in scoping reviews

Resources and further reading

JBI template source of evidence details, characteristics and results extraction instrument Full Text

Pollock, D., Peters, M. D., Khalil, H., McInerney, P., Alexander, L., Tricco, A. C., ... & Munn, Z. (2023). Recommendations for the extraction, analysis, and presentation of results in scoping reviews. JBI evidence synthesis, 21(3), 520-532. Full Text

PRISMA ScR - Data Charting Process - Tip Sheet PDF

Aromataris E, Munn Z (Editors). JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis. JBI, 2020. Full Text 

Colquhoun, H. L., Levac, D., O’Brien, K. K., Straus, S., Tricco, A. C., Perrier, L., … & Moher, D. (2014). Scoping reviews: time for clarity in definition, methods, and reporting. Journal of clinical epidemiology, 67(12), 1291-1294. Full Text

Tricco, A. C., Lillie, E., Zarin, W., O'Brien, K. K., Colquhoun, H., Levac, D., ... & Straus, S. E. (2018). PRISMA extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR): checklist and explanation. Annals of internal medicine, 169(7), 467-473. Full Text

Peters, M. D. (2017). Managing and coding references for systematic reviews and scoping reviews in EndNote. Medical Reference Services Quarterly, 36(1), 19-31. Full Text PDF