Continuous Systematic Literature Review: An Approach for Open Science
This addresses the issue of outdated SLRs leading to obsolete conclusions for researchers in software engineering, but it is a positional paper describing an approach under development, so it is incremental.
The paper tackles the problem of keeping Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) up-to-date in software engineering due to rapid growth in research publications, proposing Continuous Systematic Literature Review (CSLR) with tooling support to maintain constant updates and promote open science practices.
Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) play an important role in the Evidence-Based Software Engineering scenario. With the advance of the computer science field and the growth of research publications, new evidence continuously arises. This fact impacts directly on the purpose of keeping SLRs up-to-date which could lead researchers to obsolete conclusions or decisions about a research problem or investigation. Creating and maintaining SLRs up-to-date demand a significant effort due to several reasons such as the rapid increase in the amount of evidence, limitation of available databases and lack of detailed protocol documentation and data availability. Conventionally, in software engineering SLRs are not updated or updated intermittently leaving gaps between updates during which time the SLR may be missing important new research. In order to address these issues, we propose the concept, process and tooling support of Continuous Systematic Literature Review (CSLR) in SE aiming to keep SLRs constantly updated with the promotion of open science practices. This positional paper summarizes our proposal and approach under development.