PRISMA-ScR: Scoping Review Reporting Guide

A scoping review isn't a shorter systematic review — it's a different design with its own reporting standard. Using standard PRISMA 2020 for a scoping review (or vice versa) is a common reason reviewers ask for major revisions before publication.

When a scoping review is the right choice

Choose a scoping review when your goal is mapping the extent and nature of evidence on a broad topic — not answering a narrow, focused question about intervention effectiveness. Common reasons: the literature hasn't been comprehensively mapped yet, you need to identify gaps before commissioning a full systematic review, or your research question is genuinely broad by design (e.g., "what methods have been used to study X?" rather than "does X work?"). See our systematic review vs meta-analysis vs scoping review guide if you're still deciding between review types.

JBI methodology

The Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) provides the most widely used methodology for conducting a scoping review, structured around the same population/concept/context (PCC) framing used to build your research question, plus explicit guidance on search strategy, source selection, and charting (extracting) data across a broad, heterogeneous set of sources.

What PRISMA-ScR requires

PRISMA-ScR is a 20-item checklist (plus 2 optional items) extending PRISMA 2020 specifically for scoping reviews. Key differences from standard PRISMA reporting:

• No quality/risk-of-bias appraisal is required by default (though it can optionally be included) — scoping reviews map evidence rather than synthesize effect estimates, so formal appraisal isn't always the point.
• Charting the data replaces formal data extraction, focused on characterizing sources rather than pooling numeric results.
• Results are typically presented descriptively or in tabular/visual form (evidence maps, categorized tables) rather than as a quantitative synthesis.
• A completed PRISMA-ScR flow diagram is still expected, following the same logic as a standard PRISMA flow diagram — our free PRISMA flow diagram generator works for this.

Common mistakes

• Writing conclusions that read like a systematic review's synthesized findings, when a scoping review's role is to map evidence, not judge intervention effectiveness.
• Skipping formal protocol registration on the assumption it's not required — many journals and PROSPERO now accept or expect scoping review protocols too.
• Applying standard PRISMA 2020 items directly instead of the PRISMA-ScR-specific checklist.