Applicability of Retrospective and Prospective Gender Scores for Clinical and Health Data: Protocol for a Scoping Review.

Background: Gender is known to have a strong influence on human health and disease. Despite its relevance to treatment and outcome, gender is insufficiently considered in current health research. One hindering factor is the poor representation of gender information in clinical and health (meta) data.

Objective: We aim to conduct a scoping review of the literature describing gender scores. The review will provide insights into the current application of gender scores in clinical and health settings. The protocol describes how relevant literature will be identified and how gender scores will be evaluated concerning applicability and usability in scientific investigations.

Methods: Our scoping review follows the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews) guidelines. A title and abstract screening was conducted on PubMed, followed by a full-text screening. The inclusion and exclusion criteria were discussed by a team of 5 domain experts, and a data-charting form was developed. The charted data will be categorized, summarized, and analyzed based on the research questions during the scoping review.

Results: We will report our research results according to the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. The literature retrieval was carried out on June 13, 2024, and resulted in 1202 matches. As of July 2024, the scoping review is in the data extraction phase and we expect to complete and publish the results in the first quarter of 2025.

Conclusions: The scoping review lays the foundation for a retrospective gender assessment by identifying scores that can be applied to existing large-scale datasets. Moreover, it will help to formulate recommendations for standardized gender scores in future investigations.

International registered report identifier (irrid): DERR1-10.2196/57669.