Stop Building Castles on a Swamp! The Crisis of Reproducing Automatic Search in Evidence-based Software Engineering

TL;DR

This paper highlights a significant reproducibility crisis in evidence-based software engineering, revealing that most automatic search processes in studies are unreproducible, which threatens the reliability of secondary research.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of the reproducibility issues in EBSE search methods and identifies root causes, urging community collaboration to improve research reliability.

Findings

Over 50% of search strings are not reusable

87.5% of search activities are unrepeatable

More than 95% of automatic searches are unreproducible

Abstract

The evidence-based approach has increasingly been employed to synthesize empirical findings from the primary research in software engineering. Nevertheless, the reproducibility of evidence-based software engineering (EBSE) studies seems to be underemphasized. In our investigation into the automatic search of 311 sample studies, more than 50% of the search strings are not reusable; about 87.5% of the search activities (e.g., search field settings) are unrepeatable; and more than 95% of the whole automatic search implementations are unreproducible. Considering that searching is a cornerstone of an EBSE study, we are afraid that the reproducibility of the current secondary research could be worse than we can imagine. By analyzing and reporting the root causes of the aforementioned observations, we urge collaboration and cooperation among all the stakeholders in our community to improve the research reproducibility in EBSE.