Literature search yielded 1366 records. After duplicates’ removal and title/abstract screening, 48 records retrieved in full text. Fifteen studies were subsequently excluded with reasons [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25], leaving 33 [3, 26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57] reviews to be included in this overview (Fig. 1)(Table S2). Table 1 summarizes the main characteristics of the included reviews. Twenty-two were SRs with MA [3, 26,27,28,29, 31, 33, 34, 36,37,38,39, 43, 45, 47, 48, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57], nine were SRs with narrative synthesis [30, 32, 40,41,42, 49, 50, 53, 56] and two were SRs with network MA [35, 46]. These were published from 2010 to 2024. Authors’ affiliations were located at China [26, 28, 44, 45, 54, 55, 57], Brazil [31, 36, 46, 51, 53], Spain [3, 30, 32, 33], Italy [35, 39, 42, 47], USA [34, 40], Denmark [48, 49], Egypt [29], Hong Kong [37], Taiwan [38], Portugal [41], Japan [43], United Kingdom [50], Austria [52] and France [56].

Simplified PRIOR flow diagram

The operative interventions examined included extraction socket management using GBR or GTR techniques, as well as the application of APCs, intra-socket medicaments, and mesenchymal stem cells derived from dental pulp. None of the reviews assessed the influence of local anesthesia type on clinical outcomes. The control group consisted of cases undergoing spontaneous healing or comparisons between different intervention techniques or placebo.

Surgical access and closure methods focused on various flap designs, with direct comparisons conducted to assess their impact on healing outcomes. None of the reviews assessed the influence of suturing technique on clinical outcomes.

Postoperative maneuvers encompassed scaling and root planning, the administration of systemic antibiotics, and the use of mouth rinses, with these approaches evaluated against cases receiving no additional treatment. None of the reviews assessed the influence of suturing material or timing of removal on clinical outcomes.

The 33 included reviews comprised 422 overlapping index publications, of which 191 were unique. In order to avoid potential double counting of outcomes, we calculated the degree of actual overlap by estimating the CCA of each outcome of interest. For each outcome a citation matrix presenting all the included reviews in columns and index publications in rows was provided. Index publications represented in more than one eligible review were recognized in the citation matrix.

The 6 MAs [26, 36, 44, 47, 54,