An experience report on update of systematic literature reviews

Abstract

Context: In order to preserve the value of Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs), they should be frequently updated including new studies produced after the conduction of the reviews. However, most of SLRs are outdated and there is a lack of works that support the conduction of SLRs updates. Objective: The main goal of this paper is to report our experience in updating two of our SLRs. Method: To update these two SLRs, we used automated techniques based on VTM (Visual Text Mining) to guarantee the presence of relevant studies. Results: From our experience, some factors to satisfactorily update SLRs were identified: (i) to adopt software tools to support the updating process; (ii) to provide as much as possible information of previous SLR; (iii) to involve researchers from previous SLR; and (iv) to reuse protocol from preliminar SLR. Conclusions: Reported lessons learned can be used as a basis of knowledge to guide researchers when updating their SLRs.