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process regarding the development and maintenance
of software” (Dybå et al., 2005).
The relevance of SLRs is reflected in the
numerous papers that have been written since 2004
which either present SLRs of a specific subject or
deal with methodological aspects. For example,
(Brereton, et al., 2007; Turner, et al., 2008) present
lessons learned which were obtained after
performing several SLRs by following the proposed
methodology. (Dieste & Padua, 2007) present a
means to develop optimal search strategies that
retrieve as much relevant information as possible,
while maintaining low costs and effort. (Babar &
Zhang, 2009) present preliminary results from
interviews with researchers which were carried out
with the goal of independently exploring the
experiences and perceptions of the practitioners of
SLRs in order to gain an in-depth understanding of
various aspects of SLRs as a new research
methodology in Software Engineering. In
(Kitchenham, et al., 2009) an observer-participant
case study is used to analyse the impact of limited
search procedures for SLRs. In (Kitchenham, et al.,
2009) an SLR of SLRs is presented whose objective
is to review the current status of EBSE since 2004.
20 SLRs published between 2004 and 2007 are
analysed in this paper.
Further evidence of the relevance that SLRs are
taking on as a research methodology in Software
Engineering is that from 2005 onwards the
Information and Software Technology Journal has
included SLRs as a new type of paper for
submission. Moreover, since 2007 there have been
special sessions related to SLR issues at the EASE
and ESEM conferences.
While there is an established methodology for
conducting SLRs, most of the authors of papers
containing SLRs stress the difficulty of carrying
them out, which is particularly caused by the low
amount of flexibility of searches that most digital
libraries provide and the lack of a tool to support the
entire process of SLRs which would reduce the time
and resources required for effectively and efficiently
carrying out SLRs without compromising their
quality (Babar & Zhang, 2009).
The objective of this paper is to present the SLR-
Tool that we have designed and implemented to
support each of the phases in the SLR process. The
main advantage of this tool is that, unlike other
existing tools, it is free, and reduces the effort
required to carry out the SLR manually.
With regard to the SLR-Tool’s functionality, it
has the following advantages:
It can store data related to each of the activities
in each of the phases of the process used to
perform SLRs.
It allows the searches to be refined by using text
mining techniques.
It permits the definition of classification scheme
which helps the researcher to perform data
synthesis and analysis.
It uses text mining techniques to cluster the
review documents by using the similarities
among them.
It exports all the data collected in the review
process to Excel files in table or graphic
formats. It also permits the export of all the
references of the documents uploaded in the tool
to the format accepted by bibliographic
packages such as EndNote, BibTeX and Ris.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows:
Section 2 presents a summary of the tools that
currently exist to perform SLRs, emphasizing the
differences between them and the tool that we
propose in this paper. In Section 3 shows the
processes for performing SLRs. Section 4 presents
design and implementation details of SLR-Tool and
Section 5 shows an example of how the tool has
been used. Finally, Section 6 presents some
conclusions and future work.
2 RELATED WORK
To the best of our knowledge, several tools covering
some or all of the phases in the SLR process
presented in (Kitchenham & Charters, 2007) exist,
and these are summarized below:
EPPI-Reviewer (EPPI-Reviewer, 2010). This
web tool can be used by various researchers to
carry out a collaborative systematic review.
Besides supporting bibliographic management,
and inclusion and exclusion criteria
management, EPPI-Reviewer focuses most of
its functionality on plotting results, generating
reports and applying certain meta-analysis
techniques.
TrialStat's SRS software (TrialStat, 2010) is a
commercial tool. It is necessary to pay a
substantial amount to obtain a license to use this
tool.
Tools to manage bibliographies also exist. Some
of these act as metasearchers, which allow
searches to be made in digital libraries such as
ACM or IEEE, or in reference managers such as
CiteSeer. They also permit the searches to be
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