Reprioritising consultation in scoping reviews: Clarifying purposes and practices

The consultation stage of scoping reviews, originally proposed by Arksey and O'Malley and further developed by Levac et al and the Joanna Briggs Institute, remains a conceptually ambiguous and inconsistently applied component of knowledge synthesis. In this context, consultation refers to the planned, purposeful engagement with knowledge users to elicit input on priorities, interpretation and gaps and to inform dissemination strategies. Although consultation has been framed as a means to validate findings or inform dissemination, it is often treated as an optional or peripheral activity, if included at all. In this manuscript, we revisit the consultation stage as an integral, collaborative and methodologically embedded feature of scoping reviews, one that warrants the same reflexivity, rigour and transparency as other stages of the process. Drawing from recent critiques in the health professions education literature and our own experience conducting knowledge syntheses, we position consultation not as a standalone study or superfluous add-on but as a dialogical, contextually responsive strategy for engaging knowledge users meaningfully. We offer practical guidance on how to design and execute consultations with methodological intentionality, aligned with the scoping review's epistemological stance and research objectives. Through case examples from our work and additional strategies drawn from the literature, we highlight how consultation can enhance the credibility, usability and relevance of review findings. We also reflect on the ethical and epistemic considerations of consultation, including issues of authorship and the challenges that arise when feedback diverges from review findings. In doing so, we call for a shift in how the consultation stage is conceptualised, designed and reported in scoping reviews. Rather than viewing consultation as a symbolic or confirmatory gesture, we argue that it should be embraced as a dynamic, humanising process that deepens interpretation, challenges assumptions and expands the real-world applicability of scoping review findings.