Systematic Review vs Scoping Review: Scoping Review with ☸SAIMSARA

The aim of this paper is to synthesize current methodological guidance, reporting standards, and the role of automation in the conduct of systematic and scoping reviews to provide a comprehensive overview of the evidence synthesis ecosystem. The review utilises 64 studies. This evidence map indicates that the clearest signal across the literature is a functional separation between systematic reviews and scoping reviews: systematic reviews remain the preferred approach for focused questions requiring formal bias assessment, whereas scoping reviews are most useful for broad, heterogeneous, or conceptually unsettled fields. A second prominent signal is that automation has meaningful but incompletely realized potential, with reported screening workload reductions of 60% to 96% in some applications and more than 50% effort savings in others, yet uptake remains uneven across review stages and especially limited for extraction and synthesis tasks. The mapped literature also highlights persistent weaknesses in reporting quality, including nine PRISMA items falling below a 67% adherence threshold in one large assessment, alongside continuing heterogeneity in rapid reviews, overviews, network meta-analyses, and review-method selection. Practically, these findings support choosing review type according to question structure and decision context, while embedding transparent reporting, protocol registration, stakeholder input, and information-specialist expertise to improve trustworthiness. Future research should prioritize empirically validated methodological standards and updated reporting guidance that can harmonize emerging review types and support reliable integration of automation into evidence synthesis workflows.