Benefits and Drawbacks of a Graduate Course: An Experience Teaching Systematic Literature Review

TL;DR

This paper shares an experience teaching a systematic literature review course to graduate students, highlighting its benefits, challenges, and key topics, based on a decade-long survey of student outcomes and instructor insights.

Contribution

It provides an empirical evaluation of the benefits and drawbacks of SLR courses for graduate students and offers recommendations for effective teaching strategies.

Findings

SLR courses enhance students' research skills and literature review capabilities

Students perceive SLR courses as valuable for academic development

Teaching SLR involves specific challenges for educators

Abstract

Graduate courses can provide specialized knowledge for Ph.D. and Master's students and contribute to develop their hard and soft skills. At the same time, Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has been increasingly adopted in the computing area as a valuable technique to synthesize the state of the art of a given research topic. However, there is still a poor understanding of the real benefits and drawbacks of offering the SLR course for graduate students. This paper reports an experience that examines such benefits and drawbacks, the difficulties for professors (i.e., educators), and the essential SLR topics to be taught as well as a way to better teach them. We also surveyed computer science graduate students who attended the SLR course, which we have offered for almost ten years for Ph.D. and Master's students in our institution. We found the attendance to the SLR course is a valuable opportunity for graduate students to conduct the required deep literature review of their research topic, improve their research skills, and increase their formation. Hence, we recommend that Ph.D. and Masters' programs offer the SLR course to contribute to their academic achievement.