Systematic literature review supported by information retrieval techniques: A case study

Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is a means to synthesize relevant and high quality studies related to a specific topic or research questions. In general, a SLR has three phases, and the first one is the Primary Selection in which the selection of studies is usually performed manually reading title, abstract and keywords of each study. The number of published scientific studies has grown, increasing effort in carrying out this review. In this paper, we proposed two strategies to rank studies in decreasing order of importance, for a SLR, regarding the terms in the search string. These strategies are based on the Information Retrieval technique Vector Model. We implemented those strategies and conducted a case study to evaluate their applicability. As results, the second strategy presents 50% of precision on a recall of 80%. Among the contributions of this study, two strategies to rank relevant documents in a SLR, regarding the search string, were proposed and analyzed.