Guidelines for performing Systematic Research Projects Reviews.

Alicia García Holgado; Samuel Marcos Pablos; Francisco José García Peñalvo

doi:10.9781/ijimai.2020.05.005

Authors

Alicia García Holgado University of Salamanca.
Samuel Marcos Pablos University of Salamanca.
Francisco José García Peñalvo University of Salamanca.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.9781/ijimai.2020.05.005

Keywords:

Guidelines, Method, Research projects, Reviews, Systematic Review

Supporting Agencies

This research work has been carried out within the GRIAL Research Group of the University of Salamanca [29]. This research was partially funded by the Spanish Government Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness throughout the DEFINES project grant number (TIN2016-80172-R) and the Ministry of Education of the Junta de Castilla y León (Spain) throughout the T-CUIDA project (SA061P17). With the support of the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union in its Key Action 2 “Capacity-building in Higher Education”. Project W-STEM “Building the future of Latin America: engaging women into STEM” (Ref. 598923-EPP-1-2018-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP). The content of this publication does not reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Responsibility for the information and views expressed in the publication lies entirely with the authors.

Abstract

There are different methods and techniques to carry out systematic reviews in order to address a set of research questions or getting the state of the art of a particular topic, but there is no a method to carry out a systematic analysis of research projects not only based on scientific publications. The main challenge is the difference between research projects and scientific literature. Research projects are a collection of information in different formats and available in different places. Even projects from the same funding call follow a different structure in most of the cases, despite there were some requirements that they should meet at the end of the funding period. Furthermore, the sources in which the scientific literature is available provide metadata and powerful search tools, meanwhile most of the research projects are not stored in public and accessible databases, or the databases usually do not provide enough information and tools to conduct a systematic search. For this reason, this work provides the guidelines to support systematics reviews of research projects following the method called Systematic Research Projects Review (SRPR). This methodology is based on the Kitchenham’s adaptation of the systematic literature review.