Nursing Leadership Assessment Tools and Their Application Status: a Scoping Review

Background: As the pivotal role of nursing leadership in enhancing clinical practice quality, optimizing organizational efficacy, and advancing professional development becomes increasingly evident, its scientific and systematic evaluation has become crucial. However, existing nursing leadership assessment tools exhibit significant differences in theoretical basis, structural dimensions, applicable contexts, and psychometric properties, lacking systematic integration, which poses challenges for researchers and practitioners in tool selection. Objective: To systematically identify, organize and integrate the existing nursing leadership assessment tools in China and abroad by means of the scope review, and to clarify their development background, theoretical framework, dimension composition, validity and reliability evidence, application context and limitations. Methods: This study will strictly follow the scope review methodology framework proposed by Arksey and O'Malley (2005), which includes five stages: (1) identifying the research question; (2) systematically retrieving relevant literature from Chinese and English databases (such as PubMed, Web of Science, CINAHL, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang, etc.); (3) screening the literature according to predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria; (4) extracting and visualizing the characteristics and tools of the included studies using standardized data extraction forms; (5) conducting descriptive analysis and narrative integration of the data.