Mapping reviews, scoping reviews, and evidence and gap maps (EGMs): the same but different— the “Big Picture” review family

Table 1 Summary of the different roots and institutions that use mapping and scoping reviews

	Scoping review	Mapping review	EGM
Academic roots	Social sciences Arksey & O’Malley 2005 [23] Levac 2010 [24] Khalil et al. 2016 [4] Peters et al. 2020 [12]	Public health, Biomedical sciences, Environmental science James 2016 [18]	International Development 3ie Snilstveit et al. 2013 [27] Saran & White 2018 [26]
Research concepts	Inductive and Deductive	Deductive	Deductive, inductive
Research concepts	Configurative Aggregative	Aggregative	Aggregative
Guidance for methods (and reporting)	JBI (PRISMA ScR) [5,6,7,8]	SCIE, Campbell Collaboration (PRISMA ScR)	Guidance: Campbell White et al. [34]
Identifies gaps in the research	Yes	Yes	Yes—using a pre-specified framework
Visual and interactive web-based gap map	No—but may contain tables and diagrams within text	No—but may contain within text tables and diagrams—and may be produced with an EGM	Yes

^*Aggregative synthesis: where the synthesis is predominantly aggregating (adding up) data to answer the review question
^*Configurative synthesis: where the synthesis is predominantly configuring (organizing) data from the included studies to answer the review question
Aggregation and configuration fall on a continuum and all reviews are likely to both aggregate and configure data to some extent [35]
^*Deductive reasoning: a pre-existing theory or framework that must be tested
^*Inductive reasoning: an unknown theory or framework that needs to be developed

ISSN: 2046-4053