(213) A Drop in the Ocean: A Scoping Review of Metaphor Use in Pharmacy Literature

Objective : To conduct a scoping review of pharmacy literature for the use of metaphors in scholarly writing and/or educational settings.

Methods: In this scoping review, the concepts of metaphor and pharmacy students were searched with no date limitations in Medline, APA PsycINFO, CINAHL, Education Research Complete, and ERIC. In addition, 4 pharmacy education journals were searched with variations of the word metaphor. After removing duplicates, 88 articles were screened using Covidence software and pre-established eligibility criteria. Twenty-seven articles remained after screening. Data extracted from each study included journal name, type of source, and information about metaphor(s) used. Metaphors were categorized according to theme.

Results: Of the 27 articles that met the inclusion criteria, an assortment of metaphor themes emerged. The most common metaphors related to the outdoors (n=6), games/toys (n=4), construction/building/roads (n=3), sea/water (n=3), and beauty/image (n=3). Metaphors were most frequently used to frame the entire article (n=16), as opposed to appearing in a single paragraph or sentence. Metaphors were applied to exemplify points in a written source (n=15) more frequently than in teaching a course (n=7). The most common type of article using a metaphor was a commentary/opinion piece (n=13) rather than original research. Data related to year of publication, journal title, country of authors, and population were also extracted and will be reported as frequencies.

Conclusions: The use of metaphors in pharmacy teaching and scholarship is scant, only a drop in an ocean of possibility. Because metaphors help to explain ideas, increasing the uptake of this underutilized tool may help improve scholarly teaching and/or writing within pharmacy education.