TY - GEN
T1 - Establishing a Search String to Detect Secondary Studies in Software Engineering
AU - Napoleao, Bianca M.
AU - Felizardo, Katia R.
AU - Souza, Erica F.De
AU - Petrillo, Fabio
AU - Halle, Sylvain
AU - Vijaykumar, Nandamudi L.
AU - Nakagawa, Elisa Y.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 IEEE.
PY - 2021/9
Y1 - 2021/9
N2 - Context: A tertiary study can be performed to identify related reviews on a topic of interest. However, the elaboration of an appropriate and effective search string to detect secondary studies is challenging for Software Engineering (SE) researchers. Objective: The main goal of this study is to propose a suitable search string to detect secondary studies in SE, addressing issues such as the quantity of applied terms, relevance, recall and precision. Method: We analyzed seven tertiary studies under two perspectives: (1) structure - strings' terms to detect secondary studies; and (2) field: where searching - titles alone or abstracts alone or titles and abstracts together, among others. We validate our string by performing a twostep validation process. Firstly, we evaluated the capability to retrieve secondary studies over a set of 1537 secondary studies included in 24 tertiary studies in SE. Secondly, we evaluated the general capacity of retrieving secondary studies over an automated search using the Scopus digital library. Results: Our string was capable to retrieve an optimum value of over 90% of the included secondary studies (recall) with a high general precision of almost 60%. Conclusion: The suitable search string for finding secondary studies in SE contains the terms 'systematic review', 'literature review', 'systematic mapping', 'mapping study' and 'systematic map'.
AB - Context: A tertiary study can be performed to identify related reviews on a topic of interest. However, the elaboration of an appropriate and effective search string to detect secondary studies is challenging for Software Engineering (SE) researchers. Objective: The main goal of this study is to propose a suitable search string to detect secondary studies in SE, addressing issues such as the quantity of applied terms, relevance, recall and precision. Method: We analyzed seven tertiary studies under two perspectives: (1) structure - strings' terms to detect secondary studies; and (2) field: where searching - titles alone or abstracts alone or titles and abstracts together, among others. We validate our string by performing a twostep validation process. Firstly, we evaluated the capability to retrieve secondary studies over a set of 1537 secondary studies included in 24 tertiary studies in SE. Secondly, we evaluated the general capacity of retrieving secondary studies over an automated search using the Scopus digital library. Results: Our string was capable to retrieve an optimum value of over 90% of the included secondary studies (recall) with a high general precision of almost 60%. Conclusion: The suitable search string for finding secondary studies in SE contains the terms 'systematic review', 'literature review', 'systematic mapping', 'mapping study' and 'systematic map'.
KW - Search String
KW - Secondary Studies
KW - Systematic Literature Review
KW - Systematic Mapping
KW - Tertiary Study
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85119193550
U2 - 10.1109/SEAA53835.2021.00010
DO - 10.1109/SEAA53835.2021.00010
M3 - Contribution to conference proceedings
AN - SCOPUS:85119193550
T3 - Proceedings - 2021 47th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, SEAA 2021
SP - 9
EP - 16
BT - Proceedings - 2021 47th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, SEAA 2021
A2 - Baldassarre, Maria Teresa
A2 - Scanniello, Giuseppe
A2 - Skavhaug, Amund
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 47th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, SEAA 2021
Y2 - 1 September 2021 through 3 September 2021
ER -