Informed-evidence decision-making (IEDM) has emerged as the predominant principle of providing guidance for policy-making and practice, however, the best available evidences requisite of performing successfully IEDM. Different forms of evidence and different kinds of review questions call for the development of new approaches that are designed to more effectively and rigorously identify and synthesize the evidence. Fourteen methods of reviewing literature have been recently used to identify and synthesize evidence, of which scoping reviews is increasing popular. This article introduces aspects such as background, purpose and methodological frame work and explains the process of it with an example so that facilitating the dissemination and utilization of scoping review in China.
Evidence synthesis serves as a bridge between clinical practice and the best available evidence. Evidence synthesis based on high-quality randomized controlled trials is generally considered the highest level of evidence, but its external validity is limited. In some scenarios, the inclusion of non-randomized intervention studies (NRSI) in evidence synthesis may further supplement or even replace randomized controlled trial evidence, such as assessing intervention effectiveness and rare events in a broader population to provide more information for health care decision-making. With the rapid development of real-world data and the improvement of statistical analysis methods, real-world evidence, as an important source of evidence for NRSI, has accelerated the development of high-quality NRSI. However, there are numerous challenges in integrating evidence from randomized and non-randomized intervention studies due to selection and confounding biases caused by the lack of randomization. Based on previous studies, this paper systematically examines the current status of integrated randomized and non-randomized intervention studies, including integration premise, timing, methods, and result interpretation, in order to provide references for researchers and policy-makers to correctly use non-randomized research evidence and further promote optimal evidence generation and clinical practice translation.
Scoping reviews are intended to help researchers in complex and extensive fields can better address exploratory research questions, comprehensive and systematic understanding of the current development of a field. However, the current scoping review needs to be unified in the implementation process, and the emergence of the JBI scoping review execution process can solve this problem well, which combines and improves the framework of the previous execution process, and regulates the whole process of scoping review production in depth and comprehensively from the aspects of the research purpose and questions, inclusion criteria, search, screening, data extraction, and analysis of the results, etc., and it has a strong authority and professionalism. Therefore, in order to help researchers better carry out and implement the scoping reviews, this paper focuses on the JBI scoping review execution process, and through detailed interpretation of the JBI scoping review execution process and demonstration of examples, it provides references for researchers to correctly apply the JBI scoping review execution process, in order to enhance the transparency and reliability of the research results, and to promote the scientific application of scoping reviews in China.