Systematic review of homeopathic basic research on animal models: the aquatic animals project

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Systematic reviews are an important approach for identifying and mapping key developments in a given research field [1]. To synthesize the evidence, all the existing literature must be identified and categorized to provide a foundation for future systematic reviews and meta-analyses [2]. In the past few years, research into homeopathy's clinical effectiveness and biological effects has increased, broadening the evidence base of this practice. Synthesizing this evidence is an ongoing task. A scoping review contributes to this task as part of a larger project to systematically and comparably cover the entire research field of homeopathic basic research. In this umbrella project, a final scoping review will focus on animal models in basic homeopathic research, providing an overview of this broad research field. More specifically, one arm of the study will be a systematic review on aquatic animal models used in basic research on homeopathy. It will comply with the PRISMA and AMSTAR guidelines. The quality of the literature will be analyzed in different steps. First, a Manuscript Information Score (MIS, maximum score of 10) will be used to assess whether the reporting of the experiments was adequate. Second, publications with an MIS ≥ 5 are further analyzed for appropriate control and statistics, as described in [3]. From the resulting high-quality literature on aquatic animal models, the data extraction will compile the main current results. Moreover, it will be the basis for further analyses on environmental homeopathy.