Fully report all tasks, software, software versions and parameters used, even if just the defaults. Our results show that underreporting is a recurrent problem. Comprehensive reporting of the tasks, pipelines and software used is essential for further integrating results in future reviews or meta-analyses (Tedersoo et al., 2015). Furthermore, care should be taken to report not just the name of the software package, but also the exact function, and if wrapper scripts are used then the underlying functions should be reported. Considering the trade-off with current constrictions for manuscript length, this could be achieved by the inclusion of a supporting table following the STAR-METHODs philosophy (Marcus, 2016), where task reference, order within the pipeline and software used are included. Note that the task lexicon and software lists compiled in this review (see Table 1) are a very useful resource for this purpose. This reporting effort for all the wocDNA COI metabarcoding will promote rigour and robustness with an intuitive, consistent framework that makes reporting easier for the author and replication easier for the reader.