SLR-Tool - A Tool for Performing Systematic Literature Reviews

Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) have been gaining a significant amount of attention from Software Engineering researchers since 2004. SLRs are considered to be a new research methodology in Software Engineering, which allow evidence to be gathered with regard to the usefulness or effectiveness of the technology proposed in Software Engineering for the development and maintenance of software products. This is demonstrated by the growing number of publications related to SLRs that have appeared in recent years. While some tools exist that can support some or all of the activities of the SLR processes defined in (Kitchenham & Charters, 2007), these are not free. The objective of this paper is to present the SLR-Tool, which is a free tool and is available on the following website: http://alarcosj.esi.uclm.es/SLRTool/, to be used by researchers from any discipline, and not only Software Engineering. SLR-Tool not only supports the process of performing SLRs proposed in (Kitchenham & Charters, 2007), but also provides additional functionalities such as: refining searches within the documents by applying text mining techniques; defining a classification schema in order to facilitate data synthesis; exporting the results obtained to the format of tables and charts; and exporting the references from the primary studies to the formats used in bibliographic packages such as EndNote, BibTeX or Ris. This tool has, to date, been used by members of the Alarcos Research Group and PhD students, and their perception of it is that it is both highly necessary and useful. Our purpose now is to circulate the use of SLR-Tool throughout the entire research community in order to obtain feedback from other users.