Evidence-Based Software Engineering
Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering
Evidence-Based Software Engineering for Practitioners
IEEE Software
A Survey of Controlled Experiments in Software Engineering
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Journal of Systems and Software
A Systematic Review of Software Development Cost Estimation Studies
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A Systematic Review of Theory Use in Software Engineering Experiments
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Developing Search Strategies for Detecting Relevant Experiments for Systematic Reviews
ESEM '07 Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
Applying Systematic Reviews to Diverse Study Types: An Experience Report
ESEM '07 Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
Presenting software engineering results using structured abstracts: a randomised experiment
Empirical Software Engineering
Systematic literature reviews in software engineering - A systematic literature review
Information and Software Technology
Reference-based search strategies in systematic reviews
EASE'09 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
Software process simulation modeling: an extended systematic review
ICSP'10 Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on New modeling concepts for today's software processes: software process
Identifying relevant studies in software engineering
Information and Software Technology
Variability in quality attributes of service-based software systems: A systematic literature review
Information and Software Technology
Automated measurement of models of requirements
Software Quality Control
On evaluating commercial Cloud services: A systematic review
Journal of Systems and Software
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BACKGROUND: Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has become an important research methodology in software engineering since 2004. One critical step in applying this methodology is to design and execute appropriate and effective search strategy. This is quite time consuming and error-prone step, which needs to be carefully planned and implemented. There is an apparent need of a systematic approach to designing, executing, and evaluating a suitable search strategy for optimally retrieving the target literature from digital libraries. OBJECTIVE: The main objective of the research reported in this paper is to improve the search step of doing SLRs in SE by devising and evaluating systematic and practical approaches to identifying relevant studies in SE. OUTCOMES: We have systematically selected and analytically studied a large number of papers to understand the state-of-the-practice of search strategies in EBSE. Having identified the limitations of the current ad-hoc nature of search strategies used by SE researchers for SLR, we have devised a systematic approach to developing and executing optimal search strategies in SLRs. The proposed approach incorporates the concept of 'quasi-gold standard', which consists of collection of known studies and corresponding 'quasi-sensitivity' into the search process for evaluating search performance. We report the case study and its finding to demonstrate that the approach is able to improve the rigor of search process in an SLR, and can serves as the supplements to the guidelines for SLRs in EBSE. We plan to further evaluate the proposed approach using several case studies with varying topics in software engineering.