Article Text
Abstract
Introduction Tailoring health information to the needs of individuals has become an important part of modern health communications. Tailoring has been addressed by researchers from different disciplines leading to the emergence of a wide range of approaches, making the newcomers confused. In order to address this, a comprehensive overview of the field with the indications of research gaps, tendencies and trends will be helpful. As a result, a systematic protocol was outlined to conduct a scoping review within the field of computer-based health information tailoring.
Methods and analysis This protocol is based on the York’s five-stage framework outlined by Arksey and O’Malley. A field-specific structure was defined as a basis for undertaking each stage. The structure comprised three main aspects: system design, information communication and evaluation. Five leading databases were searched: PubMed, Scopus, Science Direct, EBSCO and IEEE and a broad search strategy was used with less strict inclusion criteria to cover the breadth of evidence. Theoretical frameworks were used to develop the data extraction form and a rigorous approach was introduced to identify the categories from data. Several explanatory-descriptive methods were considered to analyse the data, from which some were proposed to be employed for the first time in scoping studies.
Ethics and dissemination This study investigates the breadth and depth of existing literature on computer-tailoring and as a secondary analysis, does not require ethics approval. We anticipate that the results will identify research gaps and novel ideas for future studies and provide direction to combine methods from different disciplines. The research findings will be submitted for publication to relevant peer-reviewed journals and conferences targeting health promotion and patient education.
- health informatics
- information technology
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
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Footnotes
Contributors All authors have made substantive intellectual contributions to the development of this protocol. MT, MGA and HT conceptualised the review approach and provided general guidance to the research team. All authors were involved in developing the review questions and the review design. AK and MGA identified the framework from which EN and AK developed and tested search terms. AK and MGA initially developed the data extraction framework, which was then further developed by input from team members. AK initiated the first draft of the manuscript, which was then followed by numerous iterations with substantial input and appraisal from all of the authors. MT supervised the entire process, performed the final touch and approved the final version of the manuscript.
Funding This work was supported by Mashhad University of Medical Sciences Research Council grant number (#950392).
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.