Library Guides: Scoping Reviews for Health Sciences and Medicine: Study selection

Study Selection

Screening

Screening your results in a scoping review involves systematically reviewing and selecting relevant studies based on the pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria and ensure that selected studies meet the research question and objectives of the scoping review.

Typically, the screening process involves two stages:

Title and Abstract Screening
Full Text Screening

Title and Abstract Screening

Reviewers screen the title and abstracts of all identified studies and exclude any that do not meet the inclusion criteria

Full Text Screening

Reviewers obtain and review the full text of the remaining studies and exclude any that do not meet the inclusion criteria.

Screening - Guidelines

The JBI Manual suggests that the review should describe the actual process of screening and for all stages of selection as well as the actual procedures used for solving disagreements between reviewers.

Tools for screening

Covidence

Covidence allows you customise the settings for the screening process according to your requirements. Sorting options include the 'Most relevant' sort which uses machine learning (active learning) relevancy predictions to show the studies predicted to be most relevant.

Watch the screening instructions from Covidence below

Finding Full Text

As the second stage in the screening process requires evaluating the full text of included papers, a process of gathering these files is required.

Consider file management and where you will store these PDFs. If you have chosen to use Covidence for screening, the full text can be uploaded and no further storage is required.

To assist with accessing full text you may consider using:

Open URL + Lean Library

This way of retrieving full text files relies on a browser plugin Lean Library. Lean Library brings our collections to you seamlessly. It offers one of the friendliest ways to find full text such as PDF files.
You may sometimes need to use one of the other methods in addition to this method.
Now and then you may also need to request an item via interlibrary loan if the library does not usually subscribe to the journal in an existing database collection.
With this method, you can locate only one PDF at a time.
The PDF does not attach to the record in your library automatically. You will need to drag it across or attach the PDF manually.

Follow these steps to install and find full texts via Lean Library::

Install Lean Library in your preferred web browser.
Set Lean Library to recognise that you come from University of Melbourne
Click on the 'Open Link' icon in the EndNote toolbar or right-click on the reference in the reference window > URL > Open URL
- What happens next depends on a variety of factors and settings. Follow the prompts to complete the search.

Finding Full Text with Endnote

See instructions from the Endnote guide

Finding Full Text with Discovery

Copy and paste the article title into Discovery and follow the full text links. Download the PDF to a folder for later use or for uploading to tools such as Covidence.

Quality Assessment - Critical Appraisal

Optional

In contrast to Systematic Reviews, critical appraisal is an optional step for Scoping Reviews. When selecting a critical appraisal tool it should assess the study design of included papers.

Examples include:

CASP Critical appraisal skills programme

AMSTAR Assessment of Multiple Systematic Reviews

JBI: Critical appraisal tools

PEDro – Physiotherapy Evidence Database Developed to support evidence-based practice in physiotherapy.