A Living Meta-Analysis of the Modafinil Literature

Manual synthesis cannot keep pace with a fast-growing research literature, and ad-hoc reviews bind no evidence to a reproducible pipeline. We present a configurable, reproducible meta-analysis framework that takes a single search term and produces a complete quantitative portrait of its literature. For this instance the term is Modafinil. The pipeline dispatches across 7 literature engines (arXiv, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Crossref, PubMed, SovietRxiv, and ChinaRxiv), each degrading gracefully to a skipped source when an API key or the network is unavailable, then merges and de-duplicates records by a canonical identifier hierarchy (DOI $>$ arXiv ID $>$ Semantic Scholar ID $>$ OpenAlex ID $>$ title digest) into a corpus of $N = 2302$ records spanning 2000--2026 (26 years). Records are classified into a configurable 6-bucket subfield taxonomy (Clinical Sleep, Cognition, Pharmacology, Ps