One Step at a Time: Update on the Scoping Review

Published by Heather Woods on

Photo by Lindsay Henwood on Unsplash

This week, there is not much to report. I have continued sifting through the articles to find the ones relevant to our research project. It is getting tougher and tougher to pinpoint keywords that are not relevant as the number of articles gets smaller and smaller. Below is an update on the keywords I have added to screen the articles and an update on my progress.

Narrowing things down

To the list we created last week, I have added the following terms:

  • Secondary
  • Disorder
  • Gifted
  • Elder
  • Infant
  • Therapy
  • Diabetic
  • Sexual
  • Abuse
  • Substance
  • Addiction
  • Clinical
  • Injury
  • Handicap
  • India
  • Ghana
  • Veteran
  • Hospital
  • Deaf
  • Undergraduate
  • Senior
  • Korea
  • Elderly
  • ELL
  • ESL
  • EFL
  • Employee
  • Adults
  • Dementia
  • Dental
  • Minority
  • Teen
  • Immigrant
  • Marriage
  • Science
  • University

This is not to say that all articles that contained these words were cut. However, highlighting these words has allowed me to screen the articles and understand the context of these words in the articles more quickly.

I wish there was an option to screen by the database that articles were pulled from, as I’m noticing a lot of dissertations and theses that are coming out of the United States. Being able to filter these out would certainly help to cut the number down.

Slow and Steady Progress

We are making progress. While I didn’t manage to get 10,000 articles screened this week, I did manage to get 6,268 articles screened. The current progress is outlined below:

Screened articles Flagged for second review Irrelevant Remaining
18,362 474 17,888 5660

Next Steps

We will continue with the initial screening of the articles. I am confident we can wrap that up next week. Then I will be taking a second look at the articles flagged as “yes” or “maybe.’ I will have to take a more critical eye to come up with keywords that I can sort by to keep narrowing the list down in an efficient manner. I welcome any insight others may have.

If you have any questions or would like more information, please feel free to email me at: hwoods@uottawa.ca.

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