Automated Selection and Quality Assessment of Primary Studies

Abstract

Researchers use systematic literature reviews (SLRs) to synthesize existing evidence regarding a research topic. While being an important means to condense knowledge, conducting an SLR requires a large amount of time and effort. Consequently, researchers have proposed semi-automatic techniques to support different stages of the review process. Two of the most time-consuming tasks are (1) to select primary studies and (2) to assess their quality. In this article, we report an SLR in which we identify, discuss, and synthesize existing techniques of the software-engineering domain that aim to semi-automate these two tasks. Instead of solely providing statistics, we discuss these techniques in detail and compare them, aiming to improve our understanding of supported and unsupported activities. To this end, we identified eight primary studies that report unique techniques that have been published between 2007 and 2016. Most of these techniques rely on text mining and can be beneficial for researchers, but an independent validation using real SLRs is missing for most of them. Moreover, the results indicate the necessity of developing more reliable techniques, providing access to their implementations, and extending their scope to further activities to facilitate the selection and quality assessment of primary studies.