Editorial: Systematic Reviews in Information and Software Engineering

Systematic reviews (sometimes called systematic literature reviews in software engineering to ensure they are not confused with inspection research) are a form of secondary study that assesses the impact of individual empirical studies (referred to as primary studies). They aim to search for, and aggregate, all relevant information on a specific research topic, where within in the context of evidence-based software engineering, “information” implies empirical evidence. The basic methodology for systematic reviews was developed first for medical research. Kitchenham and Charters [6] have tried adapted the procedures to the context of software engineering and included guidelines from recent social science texts ([7], [8]). The guidelines adapted for software engineering can be found here. We recommend looking at all three sources and reading some of the systematic reviews included in this collection before attempting to undertake a systematic review, since the difficulty of performing such studies should not be underestimated.