Abstract

Objective: The objective of this rapid scoping review is to: 1) assess the prevalence of acknowledgement and authorship of patient partners in pediatric health research; 2) understand how patient partners contribute through the research process; and 3) assess how patient engagement is identified in publications. Introduction: Patient-Oriented Research (POR) is an area of increasing interest and activity, with growing funding opportunities. Patient partners with significant contributions to a research project may be eligible for formal acknowledgment or authorship, however locating patient-engaged studies is difficult and time consuming, so there is little understanding of the prevalence of patient partner acknowledgement or authorship and how patient partners typically contribute to research projects. Inclusion criteria: This rapid scoping review will consider evidence sources that investigate topics related to pediatric patients aged (0-19 years) and that include acknowledgement or descriptions of one or more patient partner(s) contributions in one or more studies. We will exclude sources that include non-pediatric patients, are not in English, and not published in full in a journal (e.g. conference abstracts). Methods: We will search MEDLINE (Ovid), Embase (Ovid) and CINAHL (EBSCOhost). In addition, we will search key sources of POR literature. To increase the rapidity of this review, only 25% of sources will be reviewed and extracted by two team members and the remaining sources will be screened and extracted by a single reviewer. Data will be extracted using a data extraction tool developed by the reviewers. The results will be presented in a tabular/and/or charted format and accompanied by a narrative summary describing how the results related to the review objectives and questions.