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The aim of this study was to identify what definitions have been published for the term ‘deprescribing’, and determine whether a unifying definition could be reached. A secondary aim was to uncover patterns between the published definitions which could explain any variation.

Systematic literature searches were performed (earliest records to February 2014) in MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, Informit, Scopus and Google Scholar. The terms deprescrib* or de‐prescrib* were employed as a keyword search in all fields. Conventional content analysis and word frequencies were used to identify characteristics of the definitions. Network analysis was conducted to visualize characteristic distribution across authors and articles.

Following removal of duplicates, 231 articles were retrieved, 37 of which included a definition. Eight characteristics of the definitions were identified: use of the term stop …