Scoping Review Research Protocol Assignment

There are several steps involved in the completion of a systematic review. You will be guided though this via information on FLO and during the 3 lectures. You will find many support materials on FLO to guide you.

In this topic, there is not enough time to go through all the steps involved in completing a systematic search and review to completion, and full reporting. To enable skipping forward (about 4 weeks full time work), these preliminary steps have been completed for you and we will go through these processes during lectures (this is simulated, not real, so you cannot seek to publish your final assignment).

These include (will make more sense during the semester):

• -  Scoping Review Research Protocol (available on FLO)
• -  PICO Search Strategy & Search Syntax (available on FLO)
• -  PRISMA Flow Diagram (available on FLO)
• -  Result = 10 ‘studies included’

o Same 10 journal papers reporting research/evaluations per Assignment 1

o All are available via the Readings link on FLO

When you report on your scoping review, you will be including copied information from the Scoping Review Research Protocol, the Prisma Flow Diagram in full, and perhaps the PICO if it works for you, with no academic integrity repercussions.

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO - Extracting the evidence (including quality assessment):

Once a researcher has conducted the search (done for you), completed the screening of articles (done for you) and identified studies to be included in your review (done for you), the next task is to extract evidence from the ‘studies included’ into summary tables.

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You will be undertaking extraction as a Team following your Journal Club presentations. This will be presented as a concise table of studies included when reporting your scoping review. The information that needs to be in included, in your/your Team’s own words is usually:

• -  Information about the paper/study – author, year, country
• -  Aim or purpose of the research or evaluation being reported
• -  Information about the research methods, including the study population – sample size,

participants, age, gender, diagnosis or other participant characteristics (e.g. chronic disease, homeless, loneliness, etc.), control group/comparator (if relevant), study design, purpose/type of study (if relevant), intervention, comparison (if relevant), outcome measures

• -  Information about the main results/outcomes. This could be the key themes reported and/or theory generated, or the effect size, direction and significance of effect, and/or theory generated (these will depend on whether quantitative, qualitative or mixed-methods).

Summary tables are useful to compare the design of research or evaluations and their results. They provide a good approach to presenting a concise overview of the evidence in your scoping review. This will need to be with relevance to your research question (refer to the Scoping Review Research Protocol, and you will find the research question).

While preparing a summary table, this will help you and your team to get to know the 10 studies. In fact, you will already know much of the information from the Team presentations. Once your team has worked together to complete the rough draft of the Table of Studies Included, you may amend this to fit your own Assessment 2 Review Paper.

Examining the range of range of research and evaluation methods used, and in your synthesis of results, you will be able to identify the strengths and limitations across the body of evidence in your scoping review. This step will also help you to identify studies to emphasize in drawing your conclusions. For example, the studies that have strong research designs, positive quality ratings and/or large numbers of participants will be more important for writing the evidence summary than smaller samples and weaker studies.  

WRITING UP YOUR LITERATURE REVIEW

Your 3000-word review (excluding tables and references) should be structured as follows:

Include an Introduction that:
- Defines the scope of the topic and the rationale for the research question
- Provides an overview of the topic to inform and update colleagues/readers about the issue (citing

other sources as you provide background/context/problem statement)
- Builds upon the core issues of interest from the Scoping Review Research Proposal providing the

overall structure of your literature review research activity.

Next a Methods section:
- Comprehensive description of the methods used to conduct the search, article selection, data

extraction and quality appraisal
- The methods should be described in enough detail so that someone could replicate your review

and arrive at the same articles for inclusion)
- Refer to the Scoping Review Research Proposal, but not that this has been intentionally designed

for you to check its correctness and add additional information as required for this Methods section - Include the PRISMA Flow Diagram and table summarising the ‘Studies Included’ (not included in

word counts.

Results section:
- In this section you present your synthesis (e.g., patterns you have identified from across the 10

‘Studies Included’). As you do, you critique the body of evidence (only drawing from and citing these 10 studies, including consideration of the type, quality, strengths and limitations of the evidence. Students who have done well in the past have commenced with results related to study location and design, then followed on with three key themes identified from results across the 10 studies. You do not have to report on everything.

Discussion section, in which you discuss your results in relation to context:

• -  Describe the extent and nature of any controversy, your own opinions you draw from the findings

of your review (e.g. not an uninformed opinion)

• -  Discuss the findings in relation to background context (i.e., connecting your findings/themes with

what is cited in your Introduction)

• -  Comment on the relevance to social work practice, such as service or program needs, policy change or other recommendations for current practice (as applicable) and recommendations for future program or policy developments, or research to inform social exclusion/inclusion and/or isolation, as relevant to your argument – in answer to the research question.

- A final solid paragraph in which you make a justified conclusion that summarises the whole paper, and overall findings, and contribution of your review study to the literature.

• All in one document. Please keep within these headings, no sub-headings. Do not do an abstract. Do not forget to include your PRISMA and your table of Studies Included (tables not included in word counts). Most students in the past have been able to present their Table of Studies Included over 2- pages maximum.