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A critical appraisal of systematic reviews in software engineering from the perspective of the research questions asked in the reviews

Published: 16 September 2010 Publication History

Abstract

After a seminal article introducing-evidence based software engineering in 2004, systematic reviews (SR) have been increasingly used as a method for conducting secondary studies in software engineering. Our goal is to critically appraise the use of SR in software engineering with respect to the research questions asked and the ways the questions were used in the reviews. We analyzed 53 literature reviews that had been collected in two published tertiary studies. We found that over 65% of the research questions asked in the reviews were exploratory and only 15% investigated causality questions. We concluded that there is a need for a consistent use of terminology to classify secondary studies and that reports of literature reviews should follow reporting guidelines to support assessment and comparison.

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  • (2022)A Profile of Practices for Reporting Systematic Reviews: A Conference CaseNew Perspectives in Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-20322-0_3(34-49)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2022
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  • (2016)A systematic literature review of literature reviews in software testingInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2016.09.00280:C(195-216)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2016
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  1. A critical appraisal of systematic reviews in software engineering from the perspective of the research questions asked in the reviews

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ESEM '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
    September 2010
    423 pages
    ISBN:9781450300391
    DOI:10.1145/1852786
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 16 September 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. mapping studies
    2. software engineering
    3. systematic reviews

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    ESEM '10 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 102 submissions, 29%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 130 of 594 submissions, 22%

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    View all
    • (2022)A Profile of Practices for Reporting Systematic Reviews: A Conference CaseNew Perspectives in Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-20322-0_3(34-49)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2022
    • (2017)Using Q&A websites as a method for assessing systematic reviewsProceedings of the 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1109/MSR.2017.5(238-242)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
    • (2016)A systematic literature review of literature reviews in software testingInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2016.09.00280:C(195-216)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2016
    • (2015)Quality assessment of systematic reviews in software engineeringProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/2745802.2745815(1-14)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2015
    • (2015)How have we evaluated software pattern application? A systematic mapping study of research design practicesInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2015.04.00265:C(14-38)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2015
    • (2015)What Is the State of theArt of Systematic Reviewin Engineering Education?Journal of Engineering Education10.1002/jee.20069104:2(212-242)Online publication date: 23-Apr-2015
    • (2014)Validation of Software Visualization ToolsProceedings of the 2014 Second IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization10.1109/VISSOFT.2014.19(60-69)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2014
    • (2014)Risks and risk mitigation in global software developmentInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2013.06.00556:1(54-78)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2014
    • (2013)Identifying Barriers to the Systematic Literature Review Process2013 ACM / IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1109/ESEM.2013.28(203-212)Online publication date: Oct-2013

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