Guidelines for performing systematic research projects reviews

Abstract

There are different methods and techniques to carry out systematic reviews in order to address a set of research questions or getting the state of the art of a particular topic, but there is no a method to carry out a systematic analysis of research projects not only based on scientific publications. The main challenge is the difference between research projects and scientific literature. Research projects are a collection of information in different formats and available in different places. Even projects from the same funding call follow a different structure in most of the cases, despite there were some requirements that they should meet at the end of the funding period. Furthermore, the sources in which the scientific literature is available provide metadata and powerful search tools, meanwhile most of the research projects are not stored in public and accessible databases, or the databases usually do not provide enough information and tools to conduct a systematic search. For this reason, this work provides the guidelines to support systematics reviews of research projects following the method called Systematic Research Projects Review (SRPR). This methodology is based on the Kitchenham’s adaptation of the systematic literature review.