A resource is only citable if people can see how it was made. Here's exactly how studies get found, included, described, and graded — so you can judge the whole thing for yourself.
We searched the major medical and psychology databases (PubMed, PMC, and the reference lists inside every published EFT meta-analysis and systematic review), plus the study lists maintained by ACEP and EFT Universe. Crucially, we also searched non-English literature — Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Persian, Indonesian, Arabic, German and Spanish sources — because a large share of the world's EFT trials are published in those languages and are missing from English-only directories.
Any peer-reviewed study that tested EFT (or a close variant, clearly labelled) on a health or psychological outcome. That includes randomized trials, non-randomized and uncontrolled studies, meta-analyses, biological "how it works" studies, and — deliberately — the dismantling studies and null results that question whether Tapping's acupoints matter. Excluding those would make the directory less trustworthy, not more.
Related methods are labelled, not hidden. EFT-adjacent Tapping methods appear in the directory with their own label on every study card: Thought Field Therapy (TFT), the method EFT grew out of; SEFT, an EFT-derived protocol developed in Indonesia whose setup statement uses prayer in place of EFT's standard self-acceptance phrasing; and PEP, a German tapping method. All are counted in the directory's totals — TFT and SEFT are excluded, by name, from the field's own flagship review of Clinical EFT (Church et al., 2022), so we label them the same way, and the search page can filter by method. Studies of methods that are not tapping at all are held out of the browsable pages entirely.
Every study carries a plain-English summary written for a general reader, sitting on top of the technical record (design, sample size, comparison group, outcome measures, effect size, journal). We avoid jargon in the summaries and we never dress up a small pilot study as strong proof.
Each study gets a descriptive rigor flag — higher, moderate, or preliminary — based on whether it was randomized, how large it was, whether it used a credible comparison group, and whether outcomes were measured with validated tools. This flags the quality of the test, not a verdict on whether Tapping works.
Effect sizes and sample sizes are transcribed from primary papers or peer-reviewed meta-analysis tables and checked against the source. During this process we found and corrected several effect sizes that had been inflated in secondary sources — for example, values that were actually within-group before-and-after changes being presented as if they were the treatment's advantage over a control group. Where a number could not be independently confirmed, the study is marked accordingly rather than presented as verified.
A worked example. A 2018 meta-analysis testing whether the acupoint-tapping component of EFT is an active ingredient was published with standard-deviation errors that overstated its pooled effect. After the errors were identified, an independent statistician reran the analysis and the journal published a formal corrigendum: the corrected pooled effect across the six component studies is Hedges' g = 0.73 (95% CI 0.42-1.04), lower than originally reported but still a significant, moderate-to-large effect. This site shows the corrected figure, keeps the corrigendum itself as a catalogued record so you can see exactly what changed, and applies the same rule everywhere: when a published number is corrected, the correction wins, and the paper trail stays public.
The research is thin on head-to-head comparisons against established treatments like CBT, on long-term follow-up, and on active ("sham tapping") controls that could show whether the acupoints themselves matter. The evidence is strongest for anxiety, PTSD and depression, and much thinner for physical conditions. We say so on each page rather than papering over it.