A rational design process: How and why to fake it
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Designing Scientific Knowledge Infrastructures: The Contribution of Epistemology
Information Systems Frontiers
Preliminary guidelines for empirical research in software engineering
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Experiences using systematic review guidelines
Journal of Systems and Software
A Hands-On Approach for Teaching Systematic Review
PROFES '08 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement
Experiences conducting systematic reviews from novices' perspective
EASE'10 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
Systematic review of statistical process control: an experience report
EASE'07 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
A systematic review of systematic review process research in software engineering
Information and Software Technology
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A systematic review is a defined and methodical way to identify, assess and analyse published primary studies in order to investigate a specific research question. Kitchenham has recently published guidelines for software engineering researchers performing systematic reviews. The objective of our paper is to critique Kitchenham's guidelines and to comment on systematic review generally with respect to our experiences conducting our first systematic review. Our perspective as neophytes may be particularly illuminating for other software engineering researchers who are also considering conducting their first systematic review. Overall we can recommend Kitchenham's guidelines to other researchers considering systematic reviews. We caution researchers to clearly and narrowly define the research questions they will investigate by systematic review, to reduce the overall effort and to improve the quality of the selection of papers and extraction of data. In particular we recommend defining complementary research questions that are not within the scope of the systematic review in order to clarify the boundaries of the specific research question of interest. An instance of this recommendation is that researchers should clearly define the unit of study for the systematic review.