
60 Evidence-Based Software Engineering and Systematic Reviews
FIGURE 5.2: A process for assessing search completeness using a quasi-gold
standard.
Step 1: Identify relevant journals, conferences and electronic
resources
In this step, reviewers decide which journals and conference proceedings
will be searched manually (in Step 2) and which digital libraries and indexing
services to use for the automated search (Step 4). Manual searching is quite
time consuming so the aim is to chose those outlets that are most likely to
publish relevant papers. Selecting electronic sources for the automated search
is discussed later in this chapter (see Section 5.3).