Specific force is isometric force normalised to cross-sectional area (CSA) and reflects a muscle’s intrinsic strength or contractile quality. This value has been widely reported by numerous research groups using human chemically skinned fibres obtained from different subject populations. However, comparisons between studies are very difficult because of the large variation in specific force that exists between different reports, even for fibres obtained from healthy young volunteers and prior to any intervention. The aim of this study was to undertake a systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature reporting specific force values in human skinned fibres in order to examine factors that might be contributing to this large variability. An optimised search strategy was carried out in multiple databases (Medline, Embase, Web of Science) using terms which included ‘chemically skinned,’ ‘skeletal muscle fibres/fibers,’ ‘myosin heavy chain’ and ‘specific force.’ We found 69 papers that reported specific force of fully activated (pCa 4.5) type I and/or type IIA permeabilised muscle fibres from young healthy human subjects. From these papers we collected the reported data for fibre CSA, peak fibre isometric force, fibre specific force, and methodological information. For simplicity we describe in this abstract only the results for type IIA fibres activated at 15°C, which is the most commonly used temperature and gives the most consistent results. The specific force values reported for IIA fibres at 15°C varied from 90 to 305 kilopascals (kPa) (mean 161, SD 48). Part of this large range was found to be due to different methods used to assess fibre CSA. Some authors assumed a circular cross section, whilst some assumed an elliptical cross section. Some have “corrected” for the 20% swelling believed to occur with skinning, and some have not. Also the sarcomere length at which CSA was measured varied (2.10 – 2.85µm). We reduced the published data to a uniform method of measuring CSA and found that the SD of specific force fell from 48 to 28 kPa. Using these corrected data the linear relationship between peak fibre isometric force (not normalised for specific force) and fibre CSA improved the correlation coefficient from 0.50 to 0.70. The correlation coefficient of peak fibre isometric force with fibre diameter (r = 0.65) was not stronger than with fibre CSA. Based on shared authorship, 53 of the 69 papers fell into three large research groups. For the data from these 53 papers variation between these groups accounts for approximately 30% of the variance in specific force. This suggests that methodological differences between groups are an important contributor to the large range of specific force values reported.