 So I've alluded to a few types of knowledge synthesis. I've mentioned systematic scoping reviews as well as meta-analyses. Well, what are these and how will you decide which one you and your team will be carrying out? There are a few signal studies or foundational studies that information professionals such as myself look at. One of them is the grant and booth study. This is a typology of reviews that looks at 14 different review types. It's a fantastic study. I'm not going to go through the whole thing. What I want to take out of booth is the salsa typology. So there are four elements. Actually, there's a fifth purpose that really help us to determine what these studies are for and how you should decide which one you're doing. So one key thing is you're looking at how comprehensive does your search need to be? Then what are your appraisal methods and does there have to be a quality of appraisal assessment included? How do you synthesize your information and how do you analyze your information? And according to Salsa, just going to show you a big overview but you're going to get these slides if you want if you email me about that. And you can analyze this at will later. What you see is that systematic reviews are really the ones that require the most comprehensive searches that require adhering to a protocol in order to minimize bias, right? So control, acknowledge and minimize bias. Part of that adherence to the protocol also stretches onto the appraisal and to synthesis methods. And what you end up doing is going through a process that's vastly more rigorous than the typical narrative reviews, right? So if we just take a look at that bottom row describing systematic reviews in a systematic review, you're adhering to a protocol seeking an actionable recommendation and action, something that you can do to improve or to answer a very specific research question. And that's one of the key things that we often miss when we think about doing a review. You can do a review systematically without having to answer a very specific actionable question. And when you're doing that, very often you're doing a scoping review and you are comprehensively searching and you likely still have a protocol but you are looking more at the quantity, quality and methodological variation of literature as opposed to answering a question or getting a recommendation for action, right? So this is very important. And I actually think that after Grant and Booth, apparently Booth and Grant, I always mess them up. I'm sure that first author would get very annoyed with me at this, but once we stop focusing exactly at the vocabulary or the language that they used, we find a number of viewer studies that we can take a look at that help us to see the differences between scoping and systematic reviews even more clearly. So one of my favorite recent sources is this one by Munn and others. Now Munn is part of the Joanna Briggs Institute's team and the JBI is an Australian team that does absolutely fabulous work on knowledge synthesis. They started out in applied healthcare, so nursing and similar fields, but now JBI serves education, public policy and a variety of other fields. So Munn and colleagues have written this very accessible, absolutely fantastic bite-size article. It's under 10 pages. Asking the question we're asking right now, systematic review or scoping review, how do you choose as an author, pardon me, or as a team of members, which one you're going to do? So again, this will be available to you in slides afterwards. And what do Munn and others come up? Well, they really identify the five key parts of a systematic review and contrast them to the key parts of a scoping review. And a systematic review has to uncover very broad international evidence that confirms either current practice or addresses variation and identifies new practices. That's also important. And it has to inform areas for future research, identifying conflicting results and producing statements to guide decision making. So this is hugely significant. If you have a decision, if you have to make a selection between processes, protocols or interventions, what you want to do is a systematic review. However, using very similar methods and an equally structured protocol, that's very important. If you need to just identify the types of available evidence to clarify what are the key concepts, the key ideas, what are even the definitions that might be conflicting to examine how research is conducted on a topic or in a broader field to identify key characteristics related to a concept or set of concepts, to analyze knowledge gaps and to identify knowledge gaps. And that's huge. You want to do a scoping review, right? So we have a question in chat. Should we cite articles like these in our reviews? Yes, absolutely. If you've used articles like Muns or like the booth one earlier to determine something about the process that you'll be following, it is completely fine to cite these articles. And in fact, in a couple of slides, you see I provide you with a plethora. I think there are approximately eight or 10 articles that I recommend and there are more, right? So this is not exhaustive. This is a good place to start and it's a relatively recent place to start because this field is growing by leaps and bounds and every year there are many more analyses of what should be done. So I try to go to the most recent ones, right? So I showed you a classic but the one I'm discussing right now is a recent article. So now is it also necessary to include it in production to a systematic or scoping review that justifies what we're taking the approach we take? Aha, this is such a great question, such a prescient question. Yes, it actually is, but you'll see that will be a lot easier for you to decide whether or not to do that because the protocol itself that you will be following and protocols for scoping reviews are highly recommended. I cannot recommend these enough, right? So in a systematic review, you have to have a protocol. In a scoping review, when you're outside healthcare and applied health, very often you'll see published scoping reviews that don't tell you they prepared a protocol. That's not great practice. Protocols are hugely useful to you first of all and they're also so useful because they structure your research. So yes, you will end up mentioning a lot of these issues that we're discussing right now because the protocol requires you to, okay? So that's an excellent question, absolutely excellent. In some areas, especially in healthcare, scoping reviews can be precursors to systematic reviews but that's by no means necessary. A scoping review can be a perfectly good standalone piece of work and very often in other fields outside of healthcare, that's exactly what scoping reviews are. They are fully fledged important pieces of research that contribute a ton to our understanding of how fields are evolving. But excellent question, thank you for that. So this is my favorite table from one at all. This is on page six out of seven and this gives you a very nice summary, first of all, of features that of those who are starting on knowledge synthesis products are often worried about. So the features are in the first column here, such as an a priori review protocol and all the other features. And then the differences between the main three types of reviews that we're considering. And I'm going to introduce a couple of others in a moment. So do you need an a priori written up review protocol to do narrative reviews? No, you don't. Usually you have a limited amount of time. Usually you don't have a team. No, you just, you do what you know is going to be a biased review but you acknowledge the biases and you do your best. A scoping review is best with an a priori review protocol. Now, do these get published or do they get deposited somewhere? Usually not. You can register them though with either fig share or OSF. So that's open science framework, not prosper or prosper does not end up collecting any of the scoping review protocols. But as I mentioned already, scoping review protocols are hugely important for you and your team. So you should do them even if you do not share them through fig share or through OSF, right? So they are still very important. And occasionally they are required. It depends on the field and what sort of publication you are engaging with for your final publication. But look at systematic reviews. They require absolutely every one of these elements. So a protocol, then prosper or registration of the review protocol, systematic reviews, absolutely. And then again, prosper or does not register scoping review protocols. Now, what about an explicit transparent peer reviewed search strategy? That's something we'll be mentioning tomorrow. It's called the press. Oh yes. A transparent peer reviewed systematic and structured search strategy for several databases is absolutely essential, both for scoping reviews and systematic reviews. And we'll be seeing examples of those tomorrow. So not of press itself because press is the process by which we peer review a search strategies, but actual search strategies. We will see some tomorrow. Now, what about standardized data extraction? Scoping reviews and systematic reviews both require that. And that's what you'll be covering with Jess on Thursday with COVID-19. Now, what about critical appraisal and risk of bias assessments? Scoping reviews generally do not require those, but systematic reviews absolutely do, particularly in the health sciences and other applied health disciplines. Now, what about synthesis of findings from individual studies in generation of often statistically driven summary findings? Scoping reviews do not require them, whereas systematic reviews, yes, absolutely do. So you see some of the differences jumping out at you in this excellent month article. And I recommend that you read the entire article. It's only really seven pages long and not all of that is, it's text, but it's not dense. It's a fantastic accessible article, right? Do you have any questions about this or in any case, think about questions. I'll have a few more visual slides. So questions might percolate, okay? And I apologize about how dense these slides are and how fast we go, but we have to build the basics today so that we can do searches and so that you can benefit from Jess's session on Thursday. So when we look at these protocol requirements, essentially only narrative reviews do not involve protocols. Everything else involves protocols and in fact often requires protocols. So scoping reviews do not require protocols, but very often protocols are a great idea and they're recommended. If you're interested in mapping reviews, I can recommend the Gerstein site that will tell you a little bit about what's the difference between a scoping systematic and mapping review. I can tell you quickly that in a mapping review, the analysis is more visual and you very often answer a narrower question than you do in a scoping review. But because of the visual analysis, you often don't need a protocol. Now that may be changing as well because this is changing very quickly in a rapid review. If you're interested in that, the Gerstein site also described rapid reviews. Rapid reviews are systematic reviews so they're incredibly constrained again by the protocol and adherence to the steps, but they may be missing some steps or drastically limiting the amount of literature and evidence that's taken in so that they're done faster and they're often done by only one person as opposed to a team. Most other reviews tend to be done by a team. This is one of my favorite slides. This slide is just fantastic. I am not enjoying it because I made it actually adapted it from the Yale library's graphic and it helps you decide what kind of knowledge synthesis you should be doing, the first asking, well, are you alone? So for example, are you a grad student working towards dissertation or do you have a team? And if you're alone, you have very few options to do unfortunately a good job of one of those reviews. If you have to follow a robust reproducible methodology with quality assessment, that's QA. If you do have to do that, basically what's left for you is a rapid review, especially if your project has to turn around quickly. Otherwise you do a traditional narrative review. Now, if you do have a team and a team could just be two to three people and again, it depends on how much time you have. If you have fewer than five months, unfortunately, you probably just go back and do a rapid review. But if you have a bit more time, if you have six, eight months, 10 months, a year, you really have to ask yourself, am I looking for a focused recommendation, a focused question that I need to answer? And if you're not doing that, if you want to survey the literature, you do a scoping review. But if you need a focused recommendation or if you have to answer a specific question with thoughts of changing practices, you can go the quantitative way or the qualitative way. If you're going the quantitative way, you're doing a meta-analysis. If you're doing a qualitative study or qualitative analysis, you're doing a systematic review. But a meta-analysis and a systematic review are essentially sisters. Methodology is the same except the analysis. Does that make sense? Okay, I don't see questions, so I'll keep going, but please ask away. So here's another bit I like to spend a couple of minutes on. I have given you three examples here of recently published, or at least available in the literature, scoping and systematic reviews, because at this point, it's nice to get a sense of what are these projects like? I have another slide like this. So the first one is diagnosis of cognitive decline and dementia in rural areas. Oh, it's a scoping review, even though it's in healthcare, and it's looking at diagnosis, why? And what would make it a systematic review? What do you think? I'll leave that question hanging. Come back in chat. Let's take a look at the next one. The next one is US pharmacists affect as team members on patient care. And that's a systematic review in meta-analysis. Okay, so they're doing qualitative and quantitative analysis. Wow. But why is this a systematic review but not a scoping review? I don't see a question necessarily. So I'll give you a hint. You see how the first one says diagnosis of cognitive decline and dementia in rural areas? It doesn't specify any other limits, right? So we're not looking at diagnosis of cognitive decline and dementia in rural areas, let's say using telemedicine or using a particular approach or focused on a particular stage or level of dementia or decline, right? So you see the breadth of the topic right in the title of the study, whereas the second one looks at, first of all, specific population pharmacists in the US, although that's still very broad, and then looking at them as team members. So there are specific functions that they'll be performing. And then there is an outcome, patient care, right? So there will be specific outcomes that are in fact delineated in that article. There are three kinds of patient care outcomes that the authors go into. And that helps them to come up with specific questions such as what is the effect of pharmacists as team members of on-patient care given certain patient outcomes, right? And then what would be the maximization or optimization of that effect? So that's how that is a systematic review. And the final one on this page is depression among entrepreneurs, a scoping review. Okay, well here it's wide open, right? First of all, it just surveys the entire field of entrepreneurship and then mental health and specifically depression within it, right? So everything is up for grabs. You can look at anything. Does that make sense? Here's another bunch of samples. I love the office concept, the scoping review. That is a very big scoping review. That one's just going in through the entire field, basically mapping out the field. And you see, I included part of the abstract there. It uses a scoping review approach to map the field of empirical research. So at least we know what field we're moving on on office concepts and it identifies gaps. It gives recommendations. Of course, it gives definitions as well. So this is how we can go through it. By the way, you have questions about the middle article there, HIV and depression. How come that's a systematic review and the previous one, the depression among entrepreneurs was just a scoping? Well, every time we have to read the entire abstract and as much of the study as we can, but what we can see here is that the systematic review is of intervention specifically. So it's going to look at outcomes of interventions. Exactly, exactly. So one of you got it absolutely because we're looking at intervention. So you see the differences in the questions, the titles, the scope of each of these. So I think everybody's happy with that. So there are resources for further study. There are several guides that can help you to determine which type of study you'll be doing. And going back to the earlier question, you may want to include sometimes not so much the questionnaires or the decision trees, but some of the articles that may be listed in the guide. So now let's zip up a little bit and there's a ton of further reading. I just want to point out the article that's highlighted in gold. A scoping studies towards a methodological framework that is the gold standard, one of the foundational articles on scoping reviews, the ARCSI and O'Malley article. So remember, include that one. Other ones that are important here on this slide are of course, one that we discussed, but also anything by Trico. Andrea Trico is a huge expert on systematic scoping reviews. So anything that she works on tends to be great. Also, we have one of Shamsir's articles. I think her name's Lena, but I couldn't, Lena or the I could be wrong. She's at University of Ottawa, huge expert on protocols. So Shamsir, Trico, Mon, Grant and Booth, of course, and ARCSI and O'Malley here, some big names for you to follow.