Methodological literature on the reporting of systematic reviews of health economic evaluations: a scoping review protocol [version 1; peer review: 2 approved, 1 approved with reservations]

Systematic reviews of health economic evaluations play a crucial role in informing evidence-based healthcare decisions, yet they lack standardized reporting guidelines. A project has been initiated that aims to extend the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guideline for systematic reviews of health economic evaluations (PRISMA-EconEval). This scoping review forms a foundation for the PRISMA-EconEval project, aiming to identify, map, and extract candidate reporting items from the methodological literature.

The scoping review will follow the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) Checklist and involve comprehensive searches in databases such as PubMed MEDLINE, Embase, and Web of Science, covering the period from 2015 to 2024. Supplementary searching, reference checking and citation searching will target grey literature, overlooked studies and evidence prior to 2015. Inclusion criteria will focus on methodological papers that provide frameworks or recommendations for reporting systematic reviews of health economic evaluations and enhanced case studies that critically discuss methods and reporting structures. The extracted data will be coded and analyzed to produce an initial list of candidate reporting items, structured according to conventional sections of a systematic review (e.g., title, abstract, methods, results). This initial list will be used in the subsequent stages of the project and disseminated through a peer-reviewed publication and presentations at international conferences.

The outcome of this scoping review will significantly contribute to the development of a comprehensive PRISMA-EconEval reporting guideline, aimed at enhancing the transparency, consistency, and quality of systematic reviews of health economic evaluations, and provide an essential tool for authors, editors, peer-reviewers, and stakeholders.