Despite a clear trend for increased use of wocDNA COI metabarcoding, the field remains in a relatively early stage of implementation, reflected in the fact that in half of all papers (n=56, n=38 in the last four years) metabarcoding was undertaken as a proof-of-concept and the authors primarily discussed the feasibility of this method for the studied ecological system. Only 25 papers considered the sample sizes and metabarcoding procedures sufficiently rigorous to answer ecological questions. Thirty papers were primarily methodological, assessing the influences of primer choice, lab protocols and/or sequencing methods. However, within the methodological category, no paper solely studied the effect of bioinformatic pipeline choices. Indeed, only eight out of the 111 papers clearly stated that they compared different bioinformatic tools for the same task, despite the use of 116 discrete pieces of software or functions in our final count. These results illustrate the timely nature of this review, highlighting the inconsistent implementation of bioinformatic methods, in contrast to the relative maturity and harmonisation of field and laboratory methodologies.