Outcomes of a community workshop to identify and rank barriers to the systematic literature review process

Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) are an important tool used by software engineering researchers to summarize the state of knowledge about a particular topic. Currently, SLR authors must perform the difficult, time-consuming task in largely manual fashion. To identify barriers faced by SLR authors, we conducted an interactive community workshop prior to ESEM'13. Workshop participants generated a total of 100 ideas that, through group discussions, formed 37 composite barriers to the SLR process. Further analysis reveals the barriers relate to latent themes regarding the SLR process, primary studies, the practitioner community, and tooling. This paper describes the barriers identified during the workshop along with a ranking of those barriers that is based on votes by workshop attendees. The paper concludes by describing the impact of these barriers on three important constituencies: SLR Methodology Researchers, SLR Authors and SLR consumers.