
8 Evidence-Based Software Engineering and Systematic Reviews
specialist journals dedicated to publishing reviews, and with an invitation
to write a review on a given topic often being regarded as a prestigious ac-
knowledgement of the author’s academic standing. However, a problem with
this practice was (and still is) that two people who are both experts on a
given topic might well write reviews that draw contrasting conclusions—and
with each of them selecting a quite different set of sources in support of their
conclusion.
While this does not mean that an expert review is necessarily of little
value, it does raise the question of how far the review