Table 1.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

	Inclusion criteria	Exclusion criteria
Types of participants	Any participants	No study will be excluded based on participant characteristics
Issues	Studies examining ‘ethical challenge(s)’ in any healthcare context	Studies not reporting research in a healthcare context
Methodologies	Qualitative studies, mixed methods and quantitative studies, systematic reviews, structured but non-systemic reviews (narrative syntheses, rapid reviews, scoping reviews and other records with a described protocol that could be independently followed.) or their published protocols	These may include expert opinion, bioethical argument pieces or case studies and analysis.Expert reviews on topics with no formal structure or published protocol details
Timeframe	Five years. Publications indexed between 01/04/2016 and 31/03/2021	Indexed outside of this timeframe
Type of publications	Reports that contain the phrase ‘ethical challenge(s)’ in the title Peer-reviewed journal publications of empirical research or structured reviews published in English	Where no full text is available through the university subscription, study authors will be contacted for full text. If there is no response within two weeks, the study will be excluded The following will also be excluded: Conference abstracts Editorials, letters, or comment/opinion pieces Book sections