Self-harm among adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa: a scoping review protocol
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Self-harm behaviour is commonly observed in adolescents and can serve as a potential warning sign for suicide. It is prevalent among adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa, with a median lifetime prevalence of 10.3%. The negative impacts of adolescent self-harm include poor educational performance, impaired physical functioning and unemployment. Despite its significance, there is limited knowledge and intervention programmes addressing self-harm in sub-Saharan Africa. OBJECTIVE: The proposed scoping review aims to identify and analyse the current literature on the types and factors associated with self-harm among adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa. The findings will guide future systematic reviews and qualitative and quantitative studies that will help address the knowledge gap. Findings from this study will also inform strategies to address this critical issue. METHODS: This scoping review will follow the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology. Studies on self-harm among adolescents between ages 10 and 19 years in any sub-Saharan African country done between 2000 and 2024 will be included. The literature search will be conducted across the following databases: Embase (Ovid), Medline (Ovid), PsycINFO (Ovid), PubMed, African Journals Online and African Index Medicus (WHO). Additional relevant articles will be searched in grey literature databases such as Google Scholar, conference proceedings, PhD theses and dissertations. Two reviewers will conduct title and abstract screening as well as full-text screening, with any conflicts resolved by a third independent reviewer. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Ethics approval is not required for this scoping review protocol. The review process and findings will be shared with and informed by relevant knowledge users. The findings of this review will be shared globally through an open-access peer-reviewed publication and conference presentations. The results will provide new insights for future systematic reviews and both quantitative and qualitative studies. Additionally, they will inform policies and intervention programmes for self-harm among adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.099 | 0.072 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.017 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.072 | 0.016 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".