One in 10 American adults is registered with an online dating service. The number of people looking to find love online has never been greater, but the wealth of options also means that singles can spend months combing through hundreds of profiles without ever securing a successful date.

Enter Sameer Chaudhry, an internist at the University of North Texas, who proposed a collaborative project with his friend Khalid Khan, a professor of women’s health and clinical epidemiology at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry.

Dr. Chaudhry’s dating life was stagnant, his online persona garnering no response from the women he reached out to. So Dr. Chaudhry asked Dr. Khan to help him research the data on attraction and persuasion in hopes of improving his odds.

The two combed through all of the scientific literature on the topic that they could find. They eventually settled on 86 studies that focused on factors that seem to transform computer-mediated interactions into real-world dates. They reported their findings recently in the journal Evidence Based Medicine.