A FEDERATED SEARCH APPROACH TO FACILITATE SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

To impact industry, researchers developing technolo gies 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 fa r in practice, it has been resulted in valuable resea rches and is going to be more common. However, digi tal libraries and scientific databases as the best rese arch resources do not provide enough mechanism for SLRs especially in software engineering. On the oth er hand, any loss of data may change the SLR result s and leads to research bias. Accordingly, the search process and evidence collection in SLR is a critic al 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 a n automatic integrated search mechanism in wellknown Software Engineering databases. Results of ca se study show that this approach not only reduces required time to do SLR and facilitate its search p rocess, but also improves its reliability and resul ts in the increasing trend to use SLRs.