Table 3 Inclusion and exclusion criteria

• Research articles or reports in any geographical location or setting

• Research conducted in healthy or clinical populations

• Articles published in peer-reviewed journals and grey literature

• Articles reporting on development of or effects of PA messages

• Articles published in English

• Research designs including: empirical research studies (qualitative, cross-sectional or longitudinal designs, interventions or natural experiments with pre-post measures or comparison) and non-empirical research (systematic and non-systematic reviews, and methods or theory papers)

• Articles focusing on wider PA communication not within the scope of this review, for example messages not directed to public or studies using other communication techniques such as one-to-one counselling

• Abstracts without full text