Table 1 Description of key terms used in this article that may be useful for non-specialist readers

Burn injury

Burns are a type of injury to the skin (cutaneous burn) or other type of body tissue (e.g. eye — ocular burn). They may be caused by heat (thermal burn), chemicals, radiation, electricity, or friction [32].

Surveillance

Surveillance is a key aspect of public health. It is the practice of collection, analysis, and reporting of data on injuries and diseases. These data provide timely information used to set government priorities and inform methods to stop injuries and diseases [33].

Injury intent

This review aims to understand the breadth of definitions of the concept of injury intent in South Asia. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) defines this concept as ‘whether or not they [injuries] were deliberately inflicted and by whom’ (e.g. unintentional, intentional self-harm, assault, undetermined intent, intent pending) [7]. ICD is a standardised method of coding diseases. These codes are used to bring together surveillance data. South Asia is recognised to have incomplete surveillance data, and ICD is not used everywhere [23].

Burn register

A burn register is a collection of pre-specified and systematically recorded details about burn patients [34]. Burn registers typically collect data about burn patients requiring admission to hospital for their injury. Register data can be used for surveillance.

Systematic scoping review

A systematic scoping review is a method of comprehensively drawing together literature on a research question. The research question tends to be broad [35]. It involves a number of stages (in brackets is name of the stage corresponding to the subheading in this article): developing the research question, defining which papers will be included (eligibility criteria), deciding which databases will be used to identify literature (information sources), developing the terms that will be used to search databases for literature (search strategy), screening of the search results to identify studies meeting the inclusion criteria (study records), extraction of data from included studies (data items), and drawing together the results in a meaningful way (data synthesis).

Systematic review and meta-analysis

Systematic reviews use similar methods to systematic scoping reviews. Systematic reviews tend to answer research questions that are more narrow than systematic scoping reviews [35]. They were originally developed to summarise information on medical interventions (e.g. medications) to understand if there is a benefit for patients. The process of drawing together numerical data from multiple studies is known as meta-analysis.

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA)

PRISMA is a set of items that should be reported for a systematic review. It was developed to promote transparent reporting of systematic reviews to ensure that they are as understandable as possible for readers. PRISMA now issues guidance for other types and aspects of reviews including protocols and systematic scoping reviews [25, 36].

Medical and social science databases

Medical and social science databases are online warehouses of published literature. They are searched during a systematic scoping review to find articles meeting the study inclusion criteria. MEDLINE is a well-known example of a database in the field of medicine.

Search strategy

A list of words based upon the research question used to search the database for articles that may meet the study inclusion criteria. The search strategy is developed in a series of steps and must be adapted for each database. Some databases use ‘index terms’ to classify their articles. Index terms may be combined with free-text words to develop the search strategy. They can be further refined with Boolean operators (e.g. AND, OR, NOT) and filters (e.g. restrictions by date or language). Systematic scoping reviews answering a medical research question tend to include their search strategy as it would be inputted into MEDLINE. This allows readers to repeat the search if they wish.