Vitamins and Mineral supplements are a huge industry worth billions or euros per year. The evidence that they have benefits is a lot more controversial though. I first learned about this controversy around supplements from this overcomingbias post.
This 2007 meta analysis Mortality in Randomized Trials of Antioxidant Supplements for Primary and Secondary Prevention concluded "Treatment with beta carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E may increase mortality. The potential roles of vitamin C and selenium on mortality need further study."
There have been meta analysis since including newer studies with slightly different conclusions. But this one is pretty well laid out and we can add newer studies later.
With any statistical analysis it is possible to find issues with what data was included or not. One way around some of these issues is to make a public dataset of the trials used in a meta analysis and allow a quick reanalysis with some trials removed (or added).
I have been reading this book Doing Meta-Analysis with R: A Hands-On Guide and by combining an open notebook of how the meta analysis was calculated and a dataset that everyone has access to I believe arguments over the effects of inclusions of some trials and methods used in a meta analysis could be made much more explicit and worked out faster.
There is an open collaboration platform for working together on datasets https://datastack.net/ I have no connection with it. But it seems a good place to work together to make supplement meta analysis easier.
If you want to help track down papers used in this meta analysis and put them in a format others can use please message me. I have started putting up a dataset https://datastack.net/cavedave/vitaminRCTs/
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