“…The search of electronic databases identified 31,709 records, of which 37 were duplicates, and 31,630 records were excluded based on information from the title and abstract. The remaining 42 articles were evaluated for inclusion by reviewing their full text and resulted in the exclusion of 24 records for the following reasons: (1) were not RCT studies ( n = 5) (Öst, 1989 ; Maltby, 2001 ; Robbins et al, 2015 ; Miloff et al, 2019 ; Wannemueller et al, 2020 ), (2) did not evaluate the efficacy of SST ( n = 11) (Öst et al, 1991 , 1997b ; Beidel et al, 2000 ; Kim et al, 2002 ; Masia-Warner et al, 2005 ; Andersson et al, 2009 , 2013 ; Nilsson et al, 2011 ; Nielsen et al, 2016 ; Ryan et al, 2017 ; Lindner et al, 2019 ), and (3) anxiety disorders were not primary targeted outcomes ( n = 8) (Heading et al, 2001 ; Basoglu et al, 2005 ; Reinecke et al, 2013 ; Waters et al, 2014 ; Goetz and Lee, 2015 ; Schleider and Weisz, 2016 ; Schleider et al, 2019 ; Jiang et al, 2020 ). Eighteen records ultimately entered the systematic review (Öst et al, 1992 , 1997a , 2001a , b ; De Jongh et al, 1995 ; Öst, 1996 ; Götestam, 2002 ; Huey and Pan, 2006 ; Nuthall and Townend, 2006 ; Haukebo et al, 2008 ; Ollendick et al, 2009 , 2015 , 2017 ; Vika et al, 2009 ; Muller et al, 2011 ; Moldovan and David, 2014 ; Hyett et al, 2018 ; Hemyari et al, 2019 ).…”