JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Introduction Several factors come into consideration when medical students choose their future specialty. Among these factors, desire to start a family and planning the best timing for pregnancy may interfere with career advancement in certain specialties. This protocol describes a scoping review aiming to understand how representations regarding specialties and parenthood influence medical students’ career choice. Methods We will search PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, ERIC, and PsycInfo for literature. Additionally, references list of included articles will be screened for further inclusion. Rayyan and Endnote will be used to organize data screening and extraction. Ethics and dissemination The findings of this scoping review will be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal and presented as a poster at scientific conferences. Strengths and limitations This protocol and the upcoming scoping review are designed following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for scoping reviews to ensure the quality of the searching process, the data screening, and the data extraction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first scoping review aimed at understanding medical students’ career choice and parental expectations without restriction on the specialty chosen. The database selection will allow us to extract and analyze data from various disciplines. This diversity will increase our understanding of medical students’ career and personal life decisions. As we focus our search strategy on the selected databases, we may miss studies indexed in other databases and outside of journals. Preliminary research indicates that few articles have been published on the subject. Therefore, our conclusions may be limited or lack generalizability.