2 research outputs found
Establishing a Search String to Detect Secondary Studies in Software Engineering
Search for secondary studies is essential to establish whether the review on
the intended topic has already been done, avoiding waste time. In addition,
secondary studies are the inputs of a tertiary study. However, one critical
step in searching for secondary studies is to elaborate a search string. The
main goal of this work is to analyze search strings to establish directions to
better detect secondary studies in Software Engineering (SE). We analyzed seven
tertiary studies under two perspectives: (1) structure - strings' terms to
detect secondary studies; and (2) field: where searching - titles alone or
abstracts alone or titles and abstracts together, among others. We also
performed a validation of the results found. The suitable search string for
finding secondary studies in SE contain the terms "systematic review",
"literature review", "systematic mapping", "mapping study", "systematic map",
"meta-analysis", "survey" and "literature analysis". Furthermore, we recommend
(1) researchers use the title, abstract and keywords search fields in their
searches to increase studies recall; (2) researchers choose carefully their
paper title, abstract and keyword terms to increase the chance of having such
studies found on digital libraries
Establishing a search string to detect secondary studies in software engineering
Context : A tertiary study can be performed to identify related reviews on a topic of interest. However, the
elaboration of an appropriate and effective search string to detect secondary studies is challenging for Software Engineering (SE) researchers.
Objective: The main goal of this study is to propose a suitable search string to detect secondary studies in SE, addressing issues such as the quantity of applied terms, relevance, recall and precision.
Method: We analyzed seven tertiary studies under two perspectives: (1) structure – strings’ terms to detect secondary studies; and (2) field: where searching – titles alone or abstracts alone or titles and abstracts together, among others. We validate our string by performing a twostep validation process. Firstly, we evaluated the capability to retrieve secondary studies over a set of 1537 secondary studies included in 24 tertiary studies in SE. Secondly, we evaluated the general capacity of retrieving secondary studies over an automated search using the Scopus digital library.
Results: Our string was capable to retrieve an optimum value of over 90% of the included secondary studies (recall) with a high general precision of almost 60%.
Conclusion: The suitable search string for finding secondary studies in SE contains the terms “systematic review”, “literature review”, “systematic mapping”, “mapping study” and “systematic map”