---
title: "Guidelines for performing Systematic Literature Reviews in Software Engineering (v2.3)"
type: source
tags: [literature-review, systematic-review, methodology, software-engineering, canonical]
authors: [Kitchenham Barbara; Charters Stuart]
year: 2007
venue: "EBSE Technical Report EBSE-2007-01, Keele University & University of Durham"
kind: report
raw_path: "raw/Literature Review Methodology/Kitchenham-2007Systematicreviews5-8.pdf"
created: 2026-04-20
updated: 2026-04-20
key_claims:
  - A systematic literature review (SLR) is a secondary study that uses a well-defined methodology to identify, analyse and interpret all available evidence relevant to a research question in a way that is unbiased and repeatable.
  - SLRs comprise three mandatory phases - Planning, Conducting, Reporting - with defined sub-stages in each.
  - Planning includes identifying the need, optionally commissioning, specifying research question(s), developing and evaluating a review protocol.
  - Conducting covers identification of research (search strategy, publication bias, bibliography management, documenting the search), study selection (criteria, process, inclusion reliability), study quality assessment, data extraction, and data synthesis (narrative, quantitative, qualitative).
  - Reporting covers dissemination strategy, formatting the main report, and evaluating the report.
  - The research question drives everything - search, extraction and synthesis; medical PICO is adapted as PICOC (Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome, Context) per Petticrew and Roberts.
  - Software engineering SLRs differ from medical SLRs because SE lacks RCTs, has little empirical data, has proprietary data, and is methodologically closer to the social sciences than to medicine (Budgen et al. similarity scores).
  - Systematic mapping studies (scoping studies) are a lighter-weight alternative that plot evidence clusters in a broad topic rather than answering a specific question; tertiary reviews are SLRs of SLRs.
  - A pre-defined, peer-reviewed review protocol is the central mechanism for reducing researcher bias.
  - Quality assessment uses an instrument (DARE-style four-item check minimum) to grade primary studies and may be used to weight or exclude evidence.
---

# Kitchenham & Charters 2007 — SLR Guidelines for Software Engineering

The **canonical procedural reference** for systematic literature reviews in software engineering. An EBSE technical report (v2.3, July 2007) that adapts medical evidence-based review methodology (Cochrane, CRD, Australian NHMR) to the realities of software engineering research, where RCTs are rare and empirical data is often proprietary.

## Why it matters here

This guideline supplies the **backbone procedure** for any systematic literature review performed in or about BPM, predictive process monitoring, or agentic BPM. Several sources already in the wiki explicitly invoke SLR methodology — [[sources/2020-rama-maneiro-deep-learning-ppm-review]], [[sources/2019-verenich-survey-ppm]], the outcome-PPM benchmark cited in [[concepts/outcome-prediction]] — and are implicitly Kitchenham-shaped. See [[methods/systematic-literature-review]] for the distilled procedure.

## The three-phase procedure

**1. Planning** — Identify the need (confirm no existing SLR answers the question); optionally commission; **specify the research question(s)** using PICO / PICOC framing; develop a **review protocol** (search strategy, inclusion/exclusion criteria, quality instrument, data extraction form, synthesis plan); evaluate the protocol (ideally by independent peers). The protocol is the main safeguard against researcher bias.

**2. Conducting** — Identification of research (automated + manual search, publication-bias control, bibliography management, documenting the search trail); study selection against pre-registered criteria (with inter-rater reliability checks); **study quality assessment** using a graded instrument (DARE's four items as a minimum: inclusion/exclusion appropriateness, search coverage, quality/validity assessed, data adequately described); data extraction via a pre-designed form; **data synthesis** (descriptive/narrative, quantitative/meta-analytic, qualitative, or mixed — with sensitivity analysis and explicit publication-bias treatment).

**3. Reporting** — Dissemination strategy (journal, tech report, poster, web); formatting the main report (abstract, background, questions, methods, included/excluded studies, results, discussion, conclusions, appendices); evaluating the report against a checklist.

## Adaptations for software engineering

SE is similar to the social sciences (0.83 Budgen-similarity to education and nursing) and dissimilar to clinical medicine (0.17). Consequences: pre-specifying a narrow study-design filter (e.g. RCTs only) is rarely feasible; protocols must aggregate heterogeneous study types; quality checklists need SE-specific items; surrogate-measure risks (e.g. defects-in-testing as a proxy for quality) must be explicit.

## Variants
- **Systematic mapping study** (scoping study) — plots evidence clusters across a broad topic at low granularity; precursor to an SLR.
- **Tertiary review** — an SLR of SLRs in a mature domain.

## Connections
- [[methods/systematic-literature-review]] — the distilled method page.
- [[concepts/llm-assisted-literature-review]] — how the 2023+ LLM papers attach (or fail to attach) to this procedure.
- [[entities/barbara-kitchenham]] — lead author.
- Applied in the wiki via [[sources/2019-verenich-survey-ppm]], [[sources/2020-rama-maneiro-deep-learning-ppm-review]], and any future SLR-style synthesis.