Monday 3 March 2014

Systematic Literature Reviews

Literature reviews are the 'meat and potatoes' of academic research. In some disciplines the process of creating a review has become systematic, for example in Cochrane for medical research. In Software Engineering there has been an attempt to provide a process that is described and analysed here. A couple of years ago we (Balbir Barn, Franco Raimondi, Lalith Athappian and myself) were awarded some JISC funding to implement a tool to support the construction of an SLR. The first version of our SLR tool has attracted over 100 registered users from academic institutions  across the world. The process that is supported by the tool is based on Cochrane and is described in a up-coming paper in ICEIS 2014. The process is described below:


Our aim is to  create a tool that is 'model driven' in that users can create their own SLR process model and the tool will adapt to that. We have not reached that stage yet, but would be interested to get feedback from anyone who has used the current version of the tool to see how it could be improved.