Abstract Literature reviews published in peer‐reviewed journals are a prime source of general reference, as their validity and reliability are usually undisputed. This paper aims to raise awareness on biases and replicability challenges widely spread across literature reviews, using the field of efficiency of education as an example. To do so, this paper describes methodologies, selection criteria, and scopes of the literature reviews showcasing design choices and search and inclusion practices. The main finding is that all of the considered reviews on efficiency of education are biased and, on top of that, more than half of them are non‐replicable. This paper also introduces open‐source tools to help researchers reduce the incidence of biases in future reviews.
Malagon et al. (Mon,) studied this question.