Experiences Using Systematic Review Guidelines

Abstract

A systematic review is a defined and methodical way to identify, assess and analyse published primary studies in order to investigate a specific research question. Kitchenham has recently published guidelines for software engineering researchers performing systematic reviews. The objective of our paper is to critique Kitchenham’s guidelines and to comment on systematic review generally with respect to our experiences conducting our first systematic review. Our perspective as neophytes may be particularly illuminating for other software engineering researchers who are also considering conducting their first systematic review. Overall we can recommend Kitchenham’s guidelines to other researchers considering systematic reviews. We caution researchers to clearly and narrowly define the research questions they will investigate by systematic review, to reduce the overall effort and to improve the quality of the selection of papers and extraction of data. In particular we recommend defining complementary research questions that are not within the scope of the systematic review in order to clarify the boundaries of the specific research question of interest. An instance of this recommendation is that researchers should clearly define the unit of study for the systematic review.

Contributors

Mark Staples

Mahmood Niazi

Conference

Publication date: April 2006

Publication date (Print): April 2006

Pages: 1-10

Affiliations

National ICT Australia

Australian Technology Park

Garden Street, Eveleigh, NSW 1430 Australia

National ICT Australia

Australian Technology Park

Garden Street, Eveleigh, NSW 1430 Australia

and

School of Computing and Mathematics

Keele University

Staffs ST5 5BG United Kingdom

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/EASE2006.9

Copyright statement: © Mark Staples et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. 10th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE), Keele University, UK

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: 10th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE)

Conference acronym: EASE

Conference number: 10

Conference location: Keele University, UK

Conference date: 10 - 11 April 2006

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE)

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/EASE2006.9

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Categories

Series title: Electronic Workshops in Computing