Table 4.

Methodology assessment.

Author and year	Sample collection	Culture plate	Assessment method	Statistical analysis performed
Ok et al. 2015 [5]	The sample was collected in an Eppendorf tube containing BHI broth	BHI and blood agar broth	Colony forming units	Kruskal–Wallis test and mann–Whitney U test
Pujar et al. 2011 [11]	The sample was scraped from the root canal	BHI broth	Colony forming units	One-way analysis of variance with post hoc tukey tests
Choudhary et al. 2018 [12]	Sterile paper points were inserted into the canal to collect samples	BHI agar plate and SDA	Colony forming units	Intragroup comparison of Friedman's two-way analysis of variance by ranks and post hoc Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Intergroup comparison of Kruskal–Wallis test
Sedigh-Shams et al. 2015 [13]	Sterile paper points were inserted into the canal to collect samples	SDA agar plate	Colony forming units	Kruskal–Wallis and Mann–Whitney tests
Rosaline et al. 2013 [14]	Dentin specimen was spread on the slide. Stained with BacLight	Confocal laser scanning microscopy	Bacteria counted by a manual digital counter	One-way ANOVA
Gupta-Wadhwa et al. 2016 [15]	Paper point was used to the collect sample	PCR BHI agar plate	Bacterial DNA isolation and detection colony forming units	Student's t-test, the mann–whitney test, Kruskal–Wallis test, and Dunn's multiple comparison test
Sharifian et al. 2009 [16]	Dentin chips were collected from the bur	BHI agar plate	Colony forming units	One-way analysis of variance and the post hoc test (Tukey)
Divia et al. 2018 [17]	Not mentioned in the study	Not mentioned in the study	Colony forming units	Kruskal–Wallis test and student's t-test
Kumar et al. 2018 [18]	Sample collected using H file	Real time quantitative PCR	Bacterial DNA isolation and detection	One-way analysis of variance with post hoc test (Tukey)