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Systematic Literature Reviews in Software Engineering– A Tertiary Study

<33>The paper updated a previous tertiary study (Linkman paper 4) by cataloging and assessing the scope and quality of systematic literature reviews published in the software engineering discipline over an extended time scale and a using a broader automated search. This demonstrated increased use of systematic reviews in SE and further raised the profile of systematic reviews in SE. The protocol developed for this study was reused by another research group to undertake a further update.

This paper reports a study that updates a previous tertiary study (Linkman, paper 4). New insights include the identification of:

• Increasing use of the systematic review (SR) methodology in software engineering (SE) research

• A broadening of topics addressed by SRs in SE research

• Increasing SR quality

Also, it is shown that studies that cite the Kitchenham guidelines for SRs in SE have, on average, higher quality scores compared to those that do not cite the guidelines. The results of the study indicate that the cataloguing process should be based on a broad automated search of many sources rather than a targeted manual search of a limited number of SE conferences and journals.