Sustainable Systematic Literature Reviews

Why this paper is important?

Sustainability was coined in the environmental context to help researchers and individuals understand the importance of taking care of environmental issues. Due to its effectiveness in communicating the importance and complexity of the current problems that we are facing with the planet, it was also introduced to other areas, such as computer science. Researchers began to observe that the problems faced in the computing world were not strictly technical, but rather social, environmental, economic, individual, and also technical problems.

In this paper, we observe that Software Engineering community has problems while producing Literature Reviews, mainly the excessive time and effort to produce SLRs and the lack of impact in industry. Those problems are not simple to solve, since they are integrated i.e., they are systemic. In short, for a Systematic Literature Review to be sustainable it must be able to be maintained over time, causing a positive impact on the community that is its target audience and also taking into account the cost and tools used to avoid wasting resources excessively.

To conduct an SLR that fits in those attributes is great challenge. Especially because researchers needs to handle with several social, technical and economic barriers I invite you to read the full article and better understand this interesting concept that can change the way we look at literature reviews.

Abstract

Context: Systematic Literature Reviews (SLR) have been recognized as an important research method for summarizing evidence in Software Engineering (SE). At the same, SLR still presents several problems, such as the high resource consumption (mainly human resources) and lack of effective impact on SE practitioners, although much research has already been done.

Objective: The main goal of this paper is to explore the concept of sustainability in the SLR area, intending to contribute to understanding better and solving such problems in an integrated way. More specifically, this paper characterizes what sustainable SLR are, their core characteristics, critical factors (i.e., sensitive points in the SLR process), and guidelines for conducting such SLR.

Methods: We performed a meta-ethnographic study to find key concepts of sustainable software systems and transpose them to sustainable SLR. For this, we systematically selected 16 studies about sustainable software systems and 14 distinguished studies about SLR. Following, we extracted the main keywords and metaphors, determined how both areas are correlated, and transposed them to obtain a set of core characteristics of sustainable SLR as well as critical factors and guidelines. Additionally, we validated them with specialists using the Delphi method.

Results: We found 15 core characteristics that offer a broad view of sustainable SLR, 15 critical factors in the SLR process that should be carefully addressed when conducting and updating SLR, and also 16 guidelines to manage SLR from the sustainability perspective.

Conclusion: The concept of sustainability in SLR can contribute to solving SLR problems in a more integrated way, while this work could change the mindset of the SLR community about the need to conduct sustainable SLR.

Recommended citation: SANTOS, V.; IWAZAKI, A. Y.; FELIZARDO, K. R.; SOUZA, E. F.; NAKAGAWA, E. Y. (2024). "Sustainable Systematic Literature Reviews." Information and Software Technology, v.176, p.107551.
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