Comment by annoyingnoob

12 days ago

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7068624

I'm not sure what the takeaway is here? If I read that correctly, they only found one study and just reported their results? Is that because there are literally no studies on this worldwide? I find that very hard to believe.

  • A systematic review like this can be helpful, in that it identifies where there are gaps in the literature, and prevents hype - if some studies show evidence of effect, and others do not, even if there are only a few published studies then we know somthing new about the totality of the literature on the subject.

    That said, this particular systematic review has a couple of issues (e.g. I can't find the precise inclusion / exclusion criteria, nor can I find that it has been pre-registered on Prospero or another database).

    I have written a few systematic reviews where there is very little data already availabe, and we use them to explain to funders why we need to do further research on a given topic.

I know there's value to recording the selection process and all that but it's a little funny to have a review that ends up only including one study: at that point just give me a link, not a paper.