<p>Inclusion and Exclusion criteria.</p>

A 2026 scoping review by Helen Hynes, analyzing 44 publications from 2009 to 2025 on the assessment experiences of International Medical Graduates (IMGs). The review synthesizes findings from over 7,200 IMGs who qualified in 54 countries, identifying personal, social, and systemic factors affecting their competency assessments. It was published on figshare under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

Use Cases

• Identify systemic barriers in clinical assessments based on the review's headline categories of institutional and systemic factors.
• Analyze geographic and specialty research gaps based on the review's noted lack of studies from a wider geographic spread and broader range of medical specialties.
• Study demographic evidence gaps based on the review's identification of missing data on the impact of age, gender, and country of primary qualification.

Strengths

• Based on a structured scoping review following the Arksey and O'Malley framework, involving three independent reviewers.
• Synthesizes data from 44 publications covering over 7,200 IMGs from 54 countries across all six WHO world regions.
• Explicitly identifies specific evidence gaps, including the impact of age, gender, and language proficiency.

Limitations

• The dataset is very small at 9.5 KB, suggesting it contains summary or inclusion criteria data rather than the full review corpus.
• Row count and column-level documentation are unknown, limiting assessment of the underlying data structure.
• The data may reflect a geographic bias, as most sources were from the UK, Australia, and Canada.

Provenance

Source

Helen Hynes via figshare.

Collection Method

Scoping review of peer-reviewed literature from six databases (e.g., PubMed, Scopus), plus citation and grey literature searches.

Time Range

2009 to 2025

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-30 17:46:01.

Geography

Global (IMGs from 54 countries across all six WHO regions); most source studies from UK, Australia, Canada.