Scoping reviews are increasingly used in health professions education to synthesize research and scholarship, and to report on the depth and breadth of the literature on a given topic. In this Perspective, we argue that the philosophical stance scholars adopt during the execution of a scoping review, including the meaning they attribute to fundamental concepts such as knowledge and evidence, influences how they gather, analyze, and interpret information obtained from a heterogeneous body of literature. We highlight the principles informing scoping reviews and outline how epistemology-the aspect of philosophy that "deals with questions involving the nature of knowledge, the justification of beliefs, and rationality"-should guide methodological considerations, toward the aim of ensuring the production of a high-quality review with defensible and appropriate conclusions. To contextualize our claims, we illustrate some of the methodological challenges we have personally encountered while executing a scoping review on clinical reasoning and reflect on how these challenges could have been reconciled through a broader understanding of the methodology's philosophical foundation. We conclude with a description of lessons we have learned that might usefully inform other scholars who are considering undertaking a scoping review in their own domains of inquiry.
Keywords: Challenges; Epistemology; Methodology; Methods; Reviews; Scoping.