The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a barrage of primary research and reviews. We investigated the publishing process, time and resource wasting, and assessed the methodological quality of the reviews on artificial intelligence techniques to diagnose COVID-19 in medical images. We searched nine databases from inception until 1 September 2020. Two independent reviewers did all steps of identification, extraction, and methodological credibility assessment of records. Out of 725 records, 22 reviews analysing 165 primary studies met the inclusion criteria. This review covers 174,277 participants in total, including 19,170 diagnosed with COVID-19. The methodological credibility of all eligible studies was rated as critically low: 95% of papers had significant flaws in reporting quality. On average, 7.24 (range: 0-45) new papers were included in each subsequent review, and 14% of studies did not include any new paper into consideration. Almost three-quarters of the studies included less than 10% of available studies. More than half of the reviews did not comment on the previously published reviews at all. Much wasting time and resources could be avoided if referring to previous reviews and following methodological guidelines. Such information chaos is alarming. It is high time to draw conclusions from what we experienced and prepare for future pandemics.
Keywords: COVID-19; artificial intelligence; diagnosis; medical imaging; methodological credibility; systematic umbrella review.