August went really quickly for me and resulted in my PhD changing slightly.
At first the thought of changing my plans was a bit scary. I needed to get my PhD supervisors on board. I'm already 'behind' on schedule as I'm unlikely to finish all 4 of my work packages on time for them to be written into my thesis. So adding an entire new project to my PhD seemed like it may go down like a led balloon.
For context I finished my systematic review full text screen and I have ended up with 200+ included papers, with no sensible way to restrict my screening criteria. Similar systematic reviews have used more stringent criteria, such as excluding tools that took over 15 minutes to complete or excluding tools that were not validated in Europe. These ideas are fine but the idea of my review was to look at the clinimetric properties of the current screening tools available to clinicians around the world. However, with 200+ papers identifying 40+ tools I don't think this is going to be possible.
So what did I decide to do?
Well I decided that turning my systematic review into a scoping review may be the answer. A scoping review is still a comprehensive, systematic review, however a scoping review looks at the breadth of information on a topic to identify areas where a Systematic Review should be carried out. So on this idea I can use my scoping review to inform how I'm going to reduce down my systematic review papers. The main aim of my PhD is to develop a tool which helps supports families with getting a referral. Thus a scoping review on how the current screening tools were developed sounds perfect right?
So sitting in the meeting with my supervisors I explain my reasoning that;
1. I've identified more tools than the similar systematic reviews have.
2. I cannot figure out a way to reduce my number of papers without losing some of the newer screening tools that have had little publication.
3. Removing the most cited tools which have been written about in other systematic reviews doesn't make sense with what I need to get out of the project.
4. I can use the results of the scoping review to identify tools which were developed using similar methodology.
And.... my supervisors agreed with me.
I think my reflections on this is that a long as you think through your reasons for changing something in your PhD (and you present them in a semi-coherent manner) it will be fine.
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