Features of scholarly practice in health care professionals: A scoping review protocol

INTRODUCTION: Health care professionals are expected to embrace and enact the scholarly practitioner role. Scholarly practitioners demonstrate a lifelong commitment to excellence in practice through continuous learning, engagement in evidence-informed decision-making, contributions to scholarship, and knowledge translation. However, the specific features and requirements associated with this role are not uniform. The absence of well-defined and delineated conceptualizations of scholarly practice and the scarcity of empirical research on how scholarly practice is operationalized contribute to a lack of a shared understanding of this complex role. AIM: The purpose of this scoping review is to map the breadth and depth of the literature on what is known about scholarly practice in licensed health care professionals. METHODS: Arksey and O’Malley’s 6-stage scoping review framework will be used to examine the breadth and depth of the literature on the definitions and conceptualizations of the scholar role in health care professionals. We will conduct a comprehensive search from inception to present in MEDLINE (Ovid), EMBASE (Ovid), and CINAHL using scholarly practitioner terms and related synonyms, including a grey literature search. Following a calibration exercise, two independent reviewers will screen retrieved papers for inclusion and extract relevant data. Included papers will: (i) explore, describe, or define scholarly practice, scholar or scholarly practitioner, and/or related concepts in the licensed health care professionals; (ii) be conceptual and/or theoretical in nature; (iii) use quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methodologies; and (iv) be published in English or French. Numeric and thematic analysis will characterize the data and address the research objectives.