Continuous Systematic Literature Review: An Approach for Open Science

TL;DR

This paper proposes a continuous approach to updating systematic literature reviews in software engineering, leveraging open science practices to address the challenges of keeping reviews current amidst rapidly growing evidence.

Contribution

It introduces the concept, process, and tooling support for Continuous Systematic Literature Review (CSLR) to maintain up-to-date SLRs in software engineering.

Findings

Initial proposal and conceptual framework for CSLR

Addressing challenges of outdated SLRs in SE

Promoting open science practices in literature reviews

Abstract

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.