Fig. 1 Background Clinical reasoning has been called the backbone of clinical practice [1, 2]. Competency frameworks across the Health Professions (e.g. Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education Core Competencies, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada's Can MEDS framework, the General Medical Council's Good Medical Practice, the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists' Profile of Practice, the Canadian Physiotherapy Association Competency Profile) [3-7] highlight the importance of clinical reasoning. Implementing these policy documents and frameworks in the training of health professionals requires a clear conceptualization of clinical reasoning to support its assessment and teaching. While considered core to the practice of health professionals [1, 8], clinical reasoning has been discussed as either a multifaceted construct [9, 10] or a 'blackbox' phenomenon [11]. In broad terms, clinical reasoning reflects the thinking or reasoning that a health practitioner engages in to solve and manage a clinical problem. The field of clinical reasoning research represents a large literature that is rooted in early work by Elstein [12], Barrows [13, 14], Feltovitch [14], Neufeld [15], Schmidt [16], and Norman [17, 18], with a heavy focus on characterizing the cognitive processes that underpin clinical reasoning. Since then, clinical reasoning has been variably described as a process or an outcome [19]; has been discussed through the lens of various frameworks [20]; and interpreted for multiple audiences-from scholars to clinical teachers [19]. This broad and substantive literature notwithstanding, little consensus exists regarding the definition of clinical reasoning [20]. One recent review considered clinical reasoning through a series of different conceptual lenses [20], and other recent work offered insights into how various theories of clinical reasoning may be reflected in current teaching and assessment practices [21]. These works, however, are limited to the field of medicine, and are not the result of a systematic investigation of the literature across Health Professions. Given current emphasis on interprofessional training [22], and the thread of clinical reasoning throughout health professions competency profiles [3-7], a careful mapping of the concept of clinical reasoning across professions is necessary to support both profession-specific and interprofessional learning, assessment, and research. Here, we report on a scoping review conducted with the support of the Best Evidence Medical Education (BEME) collaboration [23] with the purpose of answering the question "How is clinical reasoning described in the Health Professions Education (HPE) literature?" An effective scoping review Introduction, from Young et al. [12]