What Is Systematic Literature Review Information Technology Essay

What Is authoritative Literature Review Information Technology try pop outEmpirical softwargon engineer requires the scientific employment of qualitative and duodecimal data to realize and emend the softw be product and cognitive operation. To moderate observational studies, the go steering mistreats to be coiffureed and question scheme atomic number 18 really native elements 11. Apart from the traditional manner frequently(prenominal) as experiments, case studies and surveys, the magisterial literature go off, to a fault c altoge on that pointd dictatorial inspection, is an new(prenominal) scheme becoming normally apply in data-based softw ar design in order to some(prenominal)ise relevant empirical studies and combine results to nominate reliable data for interrogationer.This paper aims to provide the general idea of dictatorial check, scarcelyt against to conduct the freshen up according to the existing guidepost and lead to improve the r oad map. The paper is structured as follows section 1 gives an foot to domineering suss out, justifys the reason why organized freshen up is accommo betrothaled, cont deathes the differences from narrative analyse and pros and cons of opinionated survey. Section 2 explains bear on of conducting domineering limit appraise in detail according to Kitchenhams guideline 1. Since in that respect ar hitherto al some re nonindulgentions and prison-breakings could be improved in the guideline, section 3 set forth those limitations and provides ghosts for improvement. Lastly, section 4 presents some concluding remarks.1.1 What is Systematic literature reexamine?Systematic literature look back is the methodological analysis that reckoners use to gather and approximate available information to specific look for covertic. The use of a SLR is in general proposed to provide an unbiased and dogmatic approach to answer a morphological question which centrees to re hunt topics. The studies or articles that use for imperious refresh ar called first studies, the self-opinionated review itself is considered as the secondary studies. The review cultivate is very formal with strict procedures and sequence. Each step of the go mustiness be well- secured and displace be reproducible by other researchers. The excerption criterion of autochthonic studies and part of welcome information are alike delimit before hand and thoroughly reviews. To identify the master(a) studies is through with(p) by the use of trenchant proficiency. All search methodology and submition criteria are transparent for the reader by described in review communications communications communications protocol. Thus, this means other readers coffin nail replicate this review in arrogant way. Finally, consumeed primary studies are analyzed and aggregated, in which forming a positive review for answer the research questions.1.2 Why Systematic reviews is destiny ed?Originally, systematic review has been introduced in medical examination and clinical line of merchandise as a way to dish out clinical practitioner divulges the answer to their question relating to their practices. ahead systematic review was implemented, researchers adjudge concentratedies in several(prenominal) areas that traditional review arouse non satisfy their need. thither is no structural way to review primary studies and to get word that all associate evidence has been guessd. To add together and evaluate the knowledge from primary studies is very difficult and likewise because each subscribe to whitethorn use different design and organization of information may be vary. The result from traditional review is difficult to evaluation if there is contradictory result. M some(prenominal) times, reader of the review have some doubt to the caliber of researchers work since the review method is not clear and explicit. In addition, collectable to broad pl ace setting of traditional review, the result of the review understructure substantially be bias as the survival of the fittest choice by subscriber may not be consistency without well defined guideline of the infusion. Thus, systematic review methodology has been introduced to address those difficulties.Systematic review knead have increasingly recognized and replaced traditional reviews in many pedantic field including packet engineering discipline since it provides effective way to summarize and look out research result to suffice those researchers in their studies. The researchers can habituate systematic review to design new studies that previously difficult in the past with traditional review. With systematic review, it helps reducing reviewer bias since it uses prey and reproducible criteria for primary sources alternative with strict mensuratement of the resources. It also help s researchers to combine result from several small studies in which can help them conclude much than precise and dependable result. Moreover, it assists in identifying gap that researchers could make further investigation 1.1.3 Differences between Systematic and Unsystematic reviewThere are several backbone differences between systematic review and unsystematic review or traditional review. This topic exit talk nigh each difference of these two slips of review.First, the search for primary studies of these two reviews is astray different, with traditional review, the grasp of primary studies search usually have wide-cut range of coverage with no strict rules how to search. In contrast, the search of primary studies in systematic review is very focused on the topics, researchers need to identify question and predefined search rules that can be reproducible by other researchers.Second, the primary sources selection serve up is also different. With systematic review, selection execute has to be predetermined researchers must decide which type of resource s is agreeable for the review so that the selection fulfil is explicit and transparent, and thus select primary sources with these strict rules and criteria. Unlike systematic review, traditional review selection process does not have specified criteria on the selection process and dependent on researchers experiences to select the primary sources.Finally, the evaluation method of systematic review followed strict evaluation rules to evaluate each of selected primary sources darn traditional review is variable based on individual researchers methods.1.4 Advantages and disadvantages of Systematic reviewThough there are several advantages that researchers can utilize systematic review method in their studies, there are fluid some disadvantages remain comparing with traditional review. Researchers pass on need to certified and select review type that is appropriate with their situation. This topic will discuss both(prenominal) advantage and disadvantage of systematic review.Adva ntages whizz of the major advantages of the systematic review is that it improves the precision and completeness of the result. Because systematic review process uses well-defined method to search and select for primary studies in which will result in less biased sources comparing with traditional review The systematic review process helps researchers to identify the consistency or inconsistency of the result from its selection process. If result is consistent, it provides strong answer to researchers questions. If not, researchers can identify the gap and then subject area the variance. This benefit will be difficult to identify by dint of traditional review process. Systematic review can apply statistic technique (meta-analysis) to help combining data from more than one primary studies which will give more precise answer to researchers question than using however one primary study. With traditional review, it will be more difficult for researchers to compare and conclude the r esult from several primary studies to answer their focus question.Disadvantages Because of its limited focus and predefined method, as it is the advantage of systematic review, it can be disadvantage in some cases. Since the process does not allow large coverage of the evidence to answer research topics. Thus, researchers must carefully determine their condition and select technique appropriately. In general, traditional review is more profitable if researchers want to obtain more broad perspective of their research topic comparing to systematic review. Traditional review is more usable if the researched topic is the brand new topic, since not much primary studies will be available. Traditional review will have more information coverage than systematic review. Due to its strictness in process and methodology, systematic review process usually needs more time and attempt from researchers to conduct the review.2. Systematic review guidelinesAs first introduced in medical research s tudied, systematic review has also been brought to software engineering field by B. Kitchenham (2004). Since software engineering research method is less strict and less experimented-dependent comparing with medical studies, the revision is needed in the process of systematic review to adapt to the characteristic of software engineering studies. The guidelines emphasise the distinction to medical systematic reviews and guide the software engineering researchers how to perform a systematic review. There are several activities involves in the systematic literature review and they are specified in the guideline. In this section, I name to the guideline suggested by Kitchenham 1 which describes a systematic review process into three main stages mean the review, Conducting the review and Document or inform or the review. Each of them consists of order of stages. The implementation each phase involves iteration, feedback and shadiness in order to move to next stage and final examly d ebate satisfactory outcomes as expositd in figure 1. Please note that there are some more optional stages described in the guideline. tho I only refer to the stages that are essential to be performedFig. 1. Phases in Systematic Review2.1 Planning the reviewIn the first phase of the review, the final outcome which would be produced is a review protocol. It is considered as a plan which defines the research questions that will be addressed by the review and basic review procedures. The planning phase consists of the following stages Identification of the need for a review Specifying the research question(s) create a review protocol Evaluating the review protocol2.1.1 Identification of the need for a review sooner conducting the review, the reasons behind why the systematic review could answer the research questions or could be useful for further must be given. Originally, the need for a systematic review initiates from the demand to fairly sum up all existing information to the hi ghest degree some phenomenon. Probably the reasons are to guard more general conclusions instead of just obtaining from individual studies, or may be carried out to lead up to further research activities. In grumpy, Kitchenham notes that the researchers should first make sure that a new systematic review is really needed before starting the review. And they should consider finding any existing systematic reviews relates to the topic of interest. It could be practicable that they do not even need a new systematic review if there existed. Besides, the already promulgated systematic review could help construct a protocol.2.1.2 Specifying the research question(s)This is the near central stage of the systematic review process. The research questions can be seen as a goal of the review since they take on the whole process of systematic review. To be in detail, the search process is conducted with the aim to classify primary studies that discuss the research questions. Furthermore, t he data inception and analysis processes must extract and synthesize the data in such a way to answer the questions.Kitchenham notes that asking the right question is the important issue in any systematic review. She provides some guideline questions to help in construct the correct questions. She also discusses the characteristics and confused types of research questions which are proper for the systematic review. For detailed structure of the questions, the PICOC (Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes, and Context) criteria are used to define the review question elements. Besides, Kitchenham discusses about the different kinds of experimental designs to bring in the acceptable studies. In particular, she argues whether studies based on primary studies of one particular type should be accepted for systematic reviews in software engineering.2.1.3 Developing a review protocolA review protocol is a concrete plan which details the process and dodge to perform a particular s ystematic review. A pre-defined protocol is crucial to minimize the adventure of researchers bias. The protocol packs all the essentials of the review and some other planning information. The elements described in protocol are background, research questions, planned search outline, study selection criteria and procedures, character assessment criteria and procedures, data extraction strategy, data entailment strategy and project timetable.Kitchenham suggests that the review protocol should be piloted during its development to find mistakes in the data search procedures, in which it can help to improve the review methodology.2.1.4 Evaluating the review protocolBecause the review protocol is significant for the systematic review, it should be evaluated before feat. The evaluation procedures are done by asking researchers or experts to review the protocol and the agreements among all reviewers must be reached.2.2 conducting the reviewThis is the execution phase which follows the plan defined in the review protocol. The final outcomes of the systematic review are generated in the end of this phase. To conduct the review, the subsequent stages must be carried out Identification of research Selection of primary studies occupy property assessment selective information extraction and monitoring Data synthesis2.2.1 Identification of researchSince the systematic review aims to find all possible of available results relating to the research question and make conclusion in a fair manner, how to generate the search strategy and publication bias are the critical issues that Kitchenham discusses in this stage. The search strategies defined in the protocol are used to discover the relevant publications. In general, the search strategies are done iteratively by trial searches using different combinations of search ground and in consultations with relevant experts. Typically the search term can be obtained by separate the research questions into individual elements ba se on PICOC criteria and then work a list of synonyms and relevant words. Another good way to derive the search term is by analyzing the heading of journals. Kitchenham notes that the search strategy should be designed to detect articles that give out pessimistic results in order to illustrate researchers bias. Other major concerns regarding the systematic review are the completeness and repeatability. Kitchenham suggests that the review process must be transparent and replicable. By providing sufficient detail when documenting the review, this enables the study to be replicable and allows the external reader to evaluate the search terms. And the search terms should be document properly.2.2.2 Selection of primary studiesThe purpose of the selection process is to assess if obtained primary studies have any actual relevance to the research questions. So that we can identify ones that provide direct information for the review. This process should proceed according to the plan define d in the protocol. Kitchenham explains that the study selection is a multistage process. Firstly, base on the research questions, the researchers should define the study criteria to point out the direct relevant studies. These inclusion and exclusion criteria should be piloted to ensure the reliability and correctness when interpreted. The exclusion criteria should be applied first in order to exclude any contrasted studies. Kitchenham suggests keeping the record of excluded publication with the reason of exclusion just after all unrelated publications have been filtered out. Then the inclusion criteria are applied to remaining studies. Kitchenham also mentions about how to increase trustworthiness of the process in an attempt to decrease the possibility of bias.2.2.3 Study grapheme assessment by and by applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria to select the primary studies, the quality of primary studies is also considered significantly important to be assessed. Kitchenham de scribes how important of the quality assessment for example, to allow researchers to evaluate differences in the study, and to freight the importance of each study when synthesize the results. She also discusses about the pecking order of the evidence described in medical guidelines. Base on their assumption, this power structure can be used to control the sorts of study included in the systematic review and it is a ground for the initial quality evaluation. To explain, the top of the hierarchy is the evidence from systematic reviews and controlled experiments, which is believed in the medical area that it is more reliable than the bottom level evidence such as the evidence from expert opinions. However, this argument was later proved that it is not always true. After that, Kitchenham describes about how to define and to use the quality instruments. Basically, checklists are used to assess quality in detailed. To construct the checklists, factors that could bias study results are considered.2.2.4 Data extraction and monitoringOnce the primary studies have been selected, the next step is to extract the relevant information. The extraction process should be performed as defined in review protocol which will describe the extraction forms used to collect the data from the filtered primary studies and also the procedure of data extraction. Kitchenham discusses what should be contained in the data collection form. not only the information to speed the answer of review question and the criteria for quality assessment are included, scarcely also the basic information such as name of reviewer, date of performing data extraction and publication detail must be given. Importantly, the extraction form must be piloted before implementation. Kitchenham suggests that there should be two or more researchers perform data extraction independently. And they have to set agreements either by consensus or by using redundant researchers to resolve disagreements on the data. If e ach paper cannot be assessed by at least two researchers, some checking technique, such as random example of primary studies, has to be employed to ensure that the data are extracted correctly. supervise data is also important to perform in this stage. Kitchenham notes that multiple publications of the equivalent study should not be contained in the systematic review since it can lead to bias. It is sometimes needed to contact the authors to make sure if those publications refer to the same study or not and also to derive the needed information if the data obtained from studies are missing or we need some unpublished data.2.2.5 Data synthesisData synthesis aims to gather and summarize the data extracted from selected primary studies. Same as other stages, the activities to be performed should be defined in the review protocol. Base on Kitchenham research on respective(a) options of data combination from several types of studies, sensitivity analyses is suggested to perform to fi nd out the impacts on the synthesis results where some studies are higher quality than others.2.3 Reporting the reviewThe purpose of this last phase is to write the results of the review. The guidelines explain there are three main stages in this phase Specifying spreading mechanism Formatting the main reveal Evaluating the reportThe final report does not only include the answers to the intended research questions, but it also need to specify the dissemination strategy so that the researcher can expose the result efficiently. Kitchenham presents seven mechanisms to disseminate the systematic reviews results. They area) academic journals and/or conferencesb) Practitioner-oriented journals and/or magazinesc) Press Releases to the popular and specialist pressd) small summary leafletse) Postersf) Web pagesg) Direct communication to affected bodiesBasically, the results are inform in two formulas in a technical report or in a conference or journal paper. After piece the reports, it is necessary to perform evaluation. Kitchenham discusses evaluation technique for each type of reports. One effective technique is organizing a peer review. The structure and contents of report papers can be seen in the Kitchenhams guideline 1.3. benefit suggestions on Systematic review guidelinesThis section aims to present limitations and to provide suggestion for improvement on each step of the systematic review guidelines on software engineering. The recommendations are collected base on lessons learned and experiences from various articles which utilize systematic review as literature review technique.The study reported in 7 reveals that one of the significant problems of publishing low quality systematic review is that some people conducting systematic review do not take in exactly what systematic review is and how to perform it. So, they end up with having no manifest research questions, explicit search strategy and so on.The subsequent suggestions should be always kept in estimation before starting and while performing the systematic review good review and study the guidelines, e.g. Kitchenhams guidelines. Review several SLR examples and experiences to help you understand the process. Make sure you understand each step of activities and be sensible for everything you do. Record the decisions made during conducting the systematic review as much as possible since this information will be needed for writing the final report.According to 2, they suggest to perform training on systematic reviewing in the very first step in order to make the reviewers great-familiar with the specific terms in the area where they will conduct systematic review. Furthermore, this helps the reviewers get better understanding about the review process and activities.3.1 Planning the reviewDuring this phase, the main activities to be performed are specifying the purpose of conducting a systematic review, formulating research questions, create and evaluating a review protoc ol.3.1.1 Identification of the need for a reviewIn order to identify the clear statement of the object of the review, the researchers should use the checklist to help pointing out the reasons and ensure their needs. Regarding this issue, there are several useful checklists provided in Kitchenhams guideline 1.In addition to identify rationale of the review, Staples and Niazi 3 collected information from case studies, surveys, and reports to check if the intended research questions are possible to be answered by systematic review. This is founded very useful since they come to know what is common and uncommon in the research questions. sometimes people thought the question is normal and feasible to be answered by other researches but in the later phases when they try searching for the related literature, they found that their question is very uncommon and then they have to retract those questions.Another crucial point is that the researchers should try to identify the existing syste matic review related to their topics of interested in order to avoid conducting a duplicate review. Nevertheless, it is quite difficult to find published systematic review in the area of software engineering comparing with medicine. Since there is no powerful scientific database which collects systematic reviews of studies related to software engineering empirical studies, like the Cochrane (www.cochrane.com) which stores a large pith of systematic reviews of medical research. Although there are currently several services providing access to sources of software engineering publications, there are still many restrictions of those publications as followings 17 The available studies is limited and disintegrated properly since many researchers in this field are focused on their own style to generate result rather than structural review process. It is difficult to combine the result of software engineering review because the quality of review is so variable with no agreed standard for s ystematic review for this field. There is no guideline that is well-accepted, though some guideline has been proposed but it neither addresses all necessary topics nor provided sufficient detail.3.1.2 Specifying the research question(s)As mentioned before, the research questions are specified as part of the review protocol and will be used to construct the search take up for searching related primary studies. Basically they will be revised repeatedly during piloting the review protocol and should not be changed when the protocol is committed.The most important point when formulate the research questions is to make them as obvious and concrete as possible. Other than structuring the question by using the PICOC criteria which is shown in 1, it is essential to specify rationale to formulate a particular question. put over the question and purpose such in table 1 could be helpful.Table 1. Research questionResearch question PurposeRQ1RQ2Brereton et al 4 recommend that during protocol c onstruction, researchers should anticipate to refine their research question both for increasing their understanding and making the automated search more effective. There are several systematic reviews, for example the Systematic literature review of guidelines for conducting systematic literature reviews in 4, which firstly define a a couple of(prenominal) research questions. Later on, after investigation some information sources, those questions are extended in more detailed questionsRegarding 5, the research questions are not only the questions that needed to be answer by the review, but also the question providing some idea in the area of such a topic for better comprehension. This is also confirmed by Staples and Niazi 3 since their research questions are part of a larger research project. By performing the systematic review on these questions will help them understand better in the project background. By selecting clear and narrow research questions, it helps confining the sc ope of a systematic literature.4 proposes another method that may help to scope the research question. That is a systematic pre-review mapping study. The idea is to map out sorts of studies relating the systematic review question have been conducted. The mapping process can be considered as a quick data extraction but the studies described are not very details. The further information about mapping study can be found at 12.3.1.3 Developing a review protocolAs explained in the section 2, the protocol provides information of the plan for conduction the review, including, for example, the procedure to be performed, the search strategy for selecting primary studies, the allocation of reviewers to some specific activities and the quality assessment criteria for evaluate primary studies. Lacking of a protocol, some process such as the selection of primary studies or data analysis and synthesis may be motivated by researcher bias 14. And because one of the come upon features of the system atic review is repeatable, a well-documented review protocol is needed to secure the reproducibility of the review.Many experiences on systematic review show that developing a review protocol is an iteration process that needs several revisions to get the complete protocol. Thus, the researchers should expect protocol changes, take a long time and allot appropriate time for it.Brereton et al 4 suggests all members in systematic review team should participate actively in constructing the review protocol, in which helps all of them get insights about the protocol and understand the process of data extraction.Additionally, piloting the review protocol is highly suggested to be performed. Not only because it supports discovering misunderstandings and mistakes in the data extraction and aggregation process, but also it may specify that the researchers need to change the method planned to plug with the research questions.As mentioned above, the search strategy must be documented in the protocol, enabling the reader of a review to evaluate how consummate and complete this is. However, due to the restriction of existing software engineering search engines that are not well-supported systematic reviews like in medicine, the software engineers should conduct resource-dependent searches. In particular, they might have to use different search string for each searchable sources which have different form interfaces and search syntaxes 4.The followings are recommendations to improve the search strategy. Searches should be performed to human action as well as abstractedness 6. However, before making a decision to accept or baulk a primary study, searching on summary and content is founded very useful. Since mostly in software engineering, the abstract and titles are not much indicative 6 and not so dependable for primary studies selection 4. either search strategy should be made up of multiple secernatewords, and it is essential to use a various combinations of terms to get the very successful search 6. Using more standardized vocabulary will drive the search results 6. For some software engineering topics, the publications in related field should be searched as well. i.e. information systems, psychology, economics, quality, artificial intelligence 6 To get the most out of relevant publications, synonyms of the main search term should be used for search 6. It is likely that adding other more general terms to synonyms of the key search term detects more relevant studies. However, this tends to increase the number of opposed articles as well. So, it should only be used when there are a number of systematic review resources available in detecting and rejecting irrelevant articles 6 It is not necessary to search on all the search fields because it is not considerably benefits the rejoinder and also requires a big causa 6. Construct search strings using Boolean AND to link the key terms and OR to group synonyms 4. An example could be the followi ng(experiment OR empirical study) AND(software cost estimation OR software effort estimation) Try searching from synonyms to the term representing the study type need to search 6. Include search fields that typically contain the key terms of the study type such as title and abstract 6. To get the key search terms. ,beak down the research questions into mavin words pertaining to the types of study that will help answer the question, technology of interested, and the response test 4. After deriving the key search terms, using various combinations of those terms to perform trial searches 6. Specifying the year of the paper first published in the search string can help lessen the amount of irrelevant articles 4. Be careful when using the Basic or Advances search forms because some search engines may produce different results even though the key searched terms are the s