1 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