Climate change and health in school-based education: A scoping review protocol

2.2. Identifying relevant studies A review of the literature will be performed in PubMED, EMBASE, Web of Science [Core Col- lection], GreenFILE, and Education Resource Information Centre. Peer-reviewed articles will be included. Grey literature databases and repositories will not be explored. PubMed searches were conducted initially to identify appropriate keywords and MeSH terms and develop the search strings. Then fitting search strings were developed for the other databases as well. The search sting includes MeSH and keywords related to “education”, “cli- mate change”, “health”, “schools”. Truncation (‘�’), wildcards, and Boolean operators (AND/ OR) are used, as appropriate, to form the search terms. The librarian of the University of Bielefeld was consulted for the development of the search strings for all six databases. The search strings for each database can be found in S2 Appendix. 2.3. Study selection The study will consider all relevant studies from 2000 onwards without any geographical restriction. The review will focus on primary and secondary, thus excluding higher education. There has been limited research throughout the 1990s regarding climate change education, with the early 2000s seeing emerging research in this field [29]. Additionally, research on the climate change and health nexus gained traction after the Millennium Development Goals adoption in 2000 [37]. Only publications in English language will be considered. Grey literature available in the public domain from websites, in the form of curricula, journal, reports, process documenta-

tion etc., will not be considered for the review, due to the methodological challenges that it presents and the reduced reproducibility. 2.3.1. Exclusion criteria. • Publications published prior to 2000 • Non-English publications • Grey literature, review papers, book reviews, unpublished conference papers, books and chapters, commentaries and editorials Titles and abstracts yielded by the search strategy will be uploaded to Endnote, where articles from different databases will be combined and duplicates will be removed. Two reviewers (LR, SK) will independently screen all titles and abstracts against the eligibility criteria to identify relevant studies. Studies that meet the criteria will then be accessed as full-text and screened against the eligibility criteria. A log of the excluded studies will be kept stating the reason for exclusion. In cases of ambiguity or disagreement, a decision of eligibility for inclusion will be made after consultation with a third reviewer (MB). Further, any study found not matching the inclusion criteria will be removed during the full-text review. 2.4. Extracting data LR will perform data charting in Microsoft Excel. The first version of data extraction sheets will be piloted by LR and SK and adjusted if necessary. LR will mainly perform data extraction for included references. SK and MB will countercheck the work of LR. 2.5. Collating, summarizing and reporting the results Data will be extracted and collected using a custom Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Extracted

data will include authors’ name and publication year, type of publication, age group of PLOS ONE Climate change and health in school-based education: A scoping review protocol PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282431 March 1, 2023 4 / 7