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Quality assessment of systematic reviews in software engineering: a tertiary study

Published: 27 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Context: The quality of an Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is as good as the quality of the reviewed papers. Hence, it is vital to rigorously assess the papers included in an SLR. There has been no tertiary study aimed at reporting the state of the practice of quality assessment used in SLRs in Software Engineering (SE).
Objective: We aimed to study the practices of quality assessment of the papers included in SLRs in SE.
Method: We conducted a tertiary study of the SLRs that have performed quality assessment of the reviewed papers.
Results: We identified and analyzed different aspects of the quality assessment of the papers included in 127 SLRs.
Conclusion: Researchers use a variety of strategies for quality assessment of the papers reviewed, but report little about the justification for the used criteria. The focus is creditability but not relevance aspect of the papers. Appropriate guidelines are required for devising quality assessment strategies.

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    EASE '15: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
    April 2015
    305 pages
    ISBN:9781450333504
    DOI:10.1145/2745802
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    • NJU: Nanjing University

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 27 April 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. quality assessment
    2. software engineering
    3. systematic (literature) review

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    • NJU

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    EASE '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 20 of 65 submissions, 31%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 71 of 232 submissions, 31%

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