A Federated Search Approach to Facilitate Systematic Literature Review in Software Engineering

ABSTRACT To impact industry, researchers developing technologies in academia need to provide tangible evidence of the advantages of using them. Nowadays, Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has become a prominent methodology in evidence-based researches. Although adopting SLR in software engineering does not go far in practice, it has been resulted in valuable researches and is going to be more common. However, digital libraries and scientific databases as the best research resources do not provide enough mechanism for SLRs especially in software engineering. On the other hand, any loss of data may change the SLR results and leads to research bias. Accordingly, the search process and evidence collection in SLR is a critical point. This paper provides some tips to enhance the SLR process. The main contribution of this work is presenting a federated search tool which provides an automatic integrated search mechanism in wellknown Software Engineering databases. Results of case study show that this approach not only reduces required time to do SLR and facilitate its search process, but also improves its reliability and results in the increasing trend to use SLRs. KEYWORDS Evidence Based Research, Systematic Literature Review, Federated search, Software Engineerin