Outcomes
ANY health outcome. Gastrointestinal function, autonomic function and related biomarkers are the outcomes of interest and are charted in detail, but no outcome restriction is applied at eligibility.Study designs: primary studies of any design (randomised controlled trials, quasi-experimental, non-randomised controlled, before-after, cohort, cross-sectional, case series, case reports, animal studies). Excluded: reviews, meta-analyses, editorials, letters, guidelines and protocols without results. Language: Chinese and English. Date: from database inception to the search date. Publication status: journal articles, dissertations, conference papers, trial registry records and preprints. Rationale for an outcome-unrestricted search. Because the aim is to map the whole evidence base and to quantify which outcomes have been studied, restricting the search by outcome terms would structurally exclude studies that did not report the outcomes of interest, making any later claim of an evidence gap circular. The primary search therefore uses intervention terms only. Information sources. PubMed; Web of Science Core Collection (SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI, ESCI, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH); Embase (Embase and Embase Classic); Cochrane CENTRAL; CNKI; Wanfang Data; VIP; SinoMed. Supplementary: backward and forward citation tracking of all included studies and of relevant reviews; ClinicalTrials.gov, ChiCTR and WHO ICTRP; Google Scholar (first 20 pages); hand-searching of core journals. Search strategy. Intervention terms only, no outcome terms. Concept blocks are derived from seed articles, from MeSH, Emtree and the SinoMed thesaurus, and from previously published reviews. Free-text and controlled-vocabulary terms are combined; truncation and American and British spelling variants are applied. Where a multi-word phrase is absent from a database's phrase index and would be silently discarded, adjacent-word combinations are used instead. The strategy is validated against ten known relevant articles. Full strategies will be reported in the supplementary material. Selection. Two reviewers independently screen titles and abstracts, then full texts, using blinded screening software. A calibration exercise on 40 records precedes formal screening. Disagreements are resolved by discussion or a third reviewer. Inter-rater agreement is reported as Cohen's kappa. Multiple reports of the same study are collated at charting rather than excluded at screening. Reporting follows PRISMA-ScR and a PRISMA 2020 flow diagram with separate branches for database searching and other sources. Data charting. A standardised form is developed a priori and piloted on eight studies. Core items are charted for all included studies; detailed intervention and outcome items are charted for studies reporting gastrointestinal, autonomic or biomarker outcomes. Items: first author and year; study ID; language; country; publication type; intervention tier; design; setting; sample size; population; animal details; acupoints; point localisation standard; modality; needle specification; depth; technique; electrical parameters; session duration; frequency; total sessions; course length; follow-up; comparator; co-interventions; outcome domain; outcome measures; instrument; measurement time point; results; direction of effect; adverse events; funding; conflicts of interest. Critical appraisal. Optional in scoping reviews but performed here to characterise the strength of the evidence. RoB 2 for randomised trials; ROBINS-I for non-randomised intervention studies; Newcastle-Ottawa Scale or JBI checklists for observational designs; SYRCLE for animal studies; JBI checklists for case series and case reports. Synthesis. Narrative synthesis with evidence gap maps (population by outcome domain; bubble size = number of studies; colour = direction of effect), stratified by intervention tier. Denominator-based reporting: the proportion of all included studies that assessed autonomic and gastrointestinal outcomes is calculated explicitly, so gaps are quantified rather than assumed. No meta-analysis is planned. Registration and reporting. Prospectively registered on Zenodo. PROSPERO does not accept scoping reviews, hence Zenodo. Reporting follows PRISMA-ScR and JBI guidance; search strategy peer review follows PRESS. Ethics. Secondary research using published literature; no ethical approval required. Version note (v2). Three changes from v1, all made before any screening and before the definitive searches: (1) the eligibility criteria were revised to remove the outcome-based restriction, with any health outcome now eligible and gastrointestinal and autonomic outcomes retained as outcomes of interest; (2) the search strategy was changed from an intervention-AND-outcome structure to an intervention-only structure; (3) the language restriction was corrected to Chinese and English, which v1 had stated in error as "no language restriction". The title is retained from v1 to preserve traceability.
