Some common frameworks include:

PICO

• Population/ Patient Problem: Who is your patient? (or disease, health status, age, gender, race, sex)
• Intervention: What do you plan to do for the patient? (specific tests, therapies, medications)
• Comparison: What is the alternative to your plan? (for example, no treatment, different type of treatment, etc.)
• Outcome: What is it that you want to accomplish, improve, measure, etc. (fewer symptoms, no symptoms, full health, etc.)

PICO variations

• PICO+ (+ = context, patient values or preferences)
• PICOT (time frame to achieve the outcome, e.g., within 6 months, within 5 visits/sessions)

PIE

• Patient/Population/Problem
• Intervention/Issue
• Evaluation/Effect

WWH

• Who
• What
• How

You can find more examples in these two guides:

Search strategies for systematic and scoping reviews are designed to capture lots of articles. We do this so you don't miss relevant articles, but this also means you'll have to weed out the irrelevant articles.

Defining exactly what you will include and what you will exclude in your review is an important step in the process. This should be done before the search strategy is finalized because the inclusion and exclusion criteria may affect which search terms are needed.

Inclusion criteria examples:

• Age groups (e.g., children 2-18 years old)
• Conservative treatment
• Treatment within scope of practice (e.g., for occupational therapists, for physical therapists, for nurses)
• Particular outcomes (e.g., range of motion, pain, activities of daily living)

Exclusion criteria examples:

• Surgical treatment
• Articles not in English
• Case studies
• Editorials, opinions

Your inclusion and exclusion criteria will be specific to your research question and your goals for the review. Your research mentor and librarian can help you with this!

Completing a systematic or scoping review requires an investment in time. In order to reduce duplication of efforts among researchers, it is helpful to (a) search protocol registries to see if your research question is already being investigated, and (b) register your protocol so other researchers can see there is already work in progress.

The protocol typically includes:

• Research question(s) (or hypothesis)
• Databases to be searched
• Search strategy (or data collection procedures)
• Information related to participants/population, intervention, comparison, outcome, context
• How data extraction will be handled (or analysis plan)
• How risk of bias will be assessed