Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis in the Field of Parasitology

Over the recent years, the number of systematic reviews and meta-analyses published in journals has been growing significantly. The editors are usually interested in such articles, as they are sup-posed to be informative and may get good cita-tion numbers, which helps to improve the rank-ing of the journal. A systematic review which is usually written by “leading researchers” and “ex-perienced authors” in specific scientific areas should cover and analyze the latest and most complete data available on a subject and aim to help scientists in the field to find answers to cer-tain questions (1). However, in many systematic review papers, the authors try to extrapolate their interpretation of data which is originated from a tiny part of available yet valuable information on the subject of interest. In fact, the data used in such works are far from representing the real pic-ture of the matter, and a large body of documents and gray literature such as journal and seminar papers and theses (especially in non-English lan-guages) may inadvertently be neglected.