Decision support tools for SLR search string construction

Abstract

Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) have gained popularity during the last years as a form of providing state of the art about previous research. As part of the SLR tasks, devising the search strategy and particularly finding the right keywords to be included in the search string is a difficult and critical step, as it will determine what evidence will be identified in the different searched sources and thus condition the rest of the review. In order to support the search process, this paper presents an iterative methodology for search string construction along with a set of decision support tools that help in building the search string by finding appropriate key terms related to the topic of interest in order to assist the researcher in the SLR conduction.