Comparing and Assessing Clinical Practice Guidelines and Consensus Statements for Healthy Athletes: A Scoping Review Protocol

ABSTRACT Introduction Healthy athletes have unique physiological, psychological, and interpersonal needs that necessitate individualized prevention and management strategies. As such, this comprehensive protocol has been created to illustrate the scope, quality and coverage of these clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) and consensus statements among this specific population. Methods and Analysis Searches will be conducted in PubMed, Scopus, SPORTDiscus, Web of Science, EMBASE, Google Scholar and any grey literature within official international organizations. Eligible publications will include CPGs and consensus statements that are aimed towards healthy athletes, published in English or Spanish since 2000. The AGREE II instrument will be applied to assess the quality of the guidelines by two independent reviewers. Disagreements will be resolved by a third reviewer. We will use descriptive statistics to summarize the main characteristics of the guidelines. Discussion This scoping review seeks towards providing an in‐depth analysis on the mapping, explaining, and evaluating of the available CPGs and consensus statements of the population of healthy athletes. Moreover, it will identify thematic trends, methodological strengths, and potential evidence gaps that currently exist. Fundamentally, the results will provide valuable information towards development of guidelines, standardization efforts, and evidence‐based practice in the future within the field of sports medicine.