A total of 6260 unique references were identified; after screening, 30 papers met the inclusion criteria for the scoping review (see Fig. 1). The characteristics of the final 30 papers are summarised in Table 3.

Flow chart showing the selection process

Papers reported on research conducted in 16 countries across five WHO regions: nine countries in Africa, including Benin [29], the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) [35], Ethiopia [26, 31], Ghana [11, 33, 36, 38, 39], Kenya [12, 27, 28, 30], Nigeria [27, 28, 30, 32], Somalia [34], Uganda [37] and Zambia [39]; three countries in the Americas, including the US [42, 44], Brazil [40, 43, 45] and Argentina [41]; two countries in South East Asia, including India [46, 48, 49] and Nepal [47]; one country in Eastern Mediterranean, in Iran [50]; and two countries in Europe, in Spain [52] and Serbia [51]. One paper reported on data from multiple international settings [10]; no research was identified from the Western Pacific.

Overall, 27 papers reported on data from urban settings [10,11,12, 26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44, 46,47,48,49,50], one paper on data from rural areas [35], and one on peri-urban areas [12]. Three papers did not specify urban or rural location [45, 51, 52].

The reviewed papers used qualitative (n = 12) [26, 31, 32, 34,35,36,37, 39, 40, 42, 44, 49], quantitative survey (n = 14) [27,28,29,30, 33, 38, 41, 43, 45,46,47,48, 50, 51], intervention or trial (n = 3) [10,11,12] and surveillance (n = 1) [52] approaches. Twenty four papers reported on the perspectives of end users (e.g., younger women, women of reproductive age, university students, male sexual partners) [10,11,12, 26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39, 41,42,43,44, 49, 52], nine papers on service providers (e.g., pharmacists, GPs, clinicians, midwives, community health workers) [26, 34, 40, 45,46,47,48, 50, 51], and four on other stakeholders (e.g., donors, policy makers, NGO workers) [26, 34, 37, 46].

With regard to type of on-demand oral contraceptive pill, 26 papers reported on ECPs [26, 28,29,30,31,32,