Bachelor Thesis BCLR-2021-08

BibliographyKarakan, Burak: Tool support for systematic literature reviews : analyzing existing solutions and the potential for automation.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology, Bachelor Thesis No. 8 (2021).
112 pages, english.
Abstract

The rising popularity of evidence-based and empirical software engineering established systematic reviews as an important research method in this field. The systematic nature of this research approach allows to identify, collect and interpret all relevant evidence regarding a specific research topic where also new research activities can be performed for further investigation. Therefore, the development of a comprehensive and detailed review protocol that documents all relevant methods, procedures and strategies for the review has to be followed to reduce the possibility of researcher bias and to increase the scientific rigor of the results. In consequence, the manual activities of systematic reviews are very time-consuming and require a lot of effort. Regarding these challenges, there is a great potential for automation with tool support to increase the efficiency and reliability of certain steps. To date, there are many tools that have been developed to support the systematic review process. However, these tools generally offer a limited support for the entire process. As the set of existing tools is large, it is difficult for researchers to keep an overview of existing tools and to select a fitting candidate. The aim of this thesis is to identify, collect and analyze existing tools supporting the systematic review process to get an efficient overview of evaluated tools which cover certain features. As a holistic tool support for the complete process seems to be lacking, typical practices for systematic reviews in the broader context of software engineering and challenges that researchers are facing while performing a systematic review are investigated to identify the most important areas for automation and to present a proposal of a holistic tool design suggestion from combination of existing tools. To achieve these aims, a set of meaningful research questions and a rigid research protocol were developed. In order to identify and collect existing tools, a rapid review was conducted. To investigate the experiences and challenges of software engineering researchers while performing systematic reviews, semi-structured interviews were performed. To analyze, compare and evaluate a set of identified tools, a feature analysis was executed. The findings of the rapid review show an increasing growth of tools to support systematic reviews in software engineering and a limited evaluation of these tools. The observations made by the participants through semi-structured interviews show a series of challenging and problem related activities that appear during the systematic review process. In relation to these activities, different tool requirements have been identified by the participants which are important for systematic literature review tool support. The results of the feature analysis show that the support of existing tools is still limited. Even if the tool support of existing tools are limited, there is a great potential for automation of certain tasks and a better tool to support systematic literature review is still needed.

Full text and
other links
Volltext
Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Software Technology, Empirical Software Engineering
Superviser(s)Wagner, Prof. Stefan; Bogner, Dr. Justus
Entry dateMay 3, 2021
   Publ. Computer Science