Improved SLR Support

With the ever-growing number of publications in computer science and other fields of research, conducting secondary studies becomes necessary to summarize the current state of the art. For software engineering research, Kitchenham popularized the systematic literature review (SLR) method to address this issue. The main idea is to systematically identify and analyze the majority of relevant publications on a specific topic. This is usually an activity that takes extensive manual effort. Some tool support does exist, but the full potential of tools has not been exploited yet. JabRef also offers basic functionality for systematic literature reviews that is used by a number of researchers to systematically “harvest” related work based on the fetching capabilities of JabRef. While using the feature, various additional feature requests came up. For instance, created search queries are currently transformed internally by JabRef to the query format of the publisher. It should also be possible to directly input a query at the publisher site, e.g., for IEEE or ACM.

More background information: Paper: Systematic Literature Tools: Are we there yet?; Presentation.

One key aspect would be the improvement of the fetcher infrastructure in JabRef to better adapt to new and changing Publisher/Journal websites and to offer a more direct integration. As an inspiration, see BibDesk.

Example SLRs: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3690632

Expected outcome:

An advanced SLR functionality, where a researcher is supported to execute a systematic-literature-review.

We did an initial project organization at https://github.com/users/koppor/projects/2.

Skills required:

• Java, JavaFX

Possible mentors:

@koppor, @calixtus, @subhramit

Project size:

175h (medium)