A checklist-based approach to assess the systematicity of the abstracts of reviews self-identifying as systematic reviews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Systematic reviews are crucial for various stakeholders since they allow them to make evidence-based decisions without being overwhelmed by a large volume of research. Systematic reviews are increasingly popular in the software engineering field. The abstract is one of the most important systematic review’s components since it usually reflects the content of the review. It may be the only part of the review that most of the readers will read when needing to form an opinion on a given topic. Besides, the content of an abstract is usually the main information readers use to decide if they want to access the full content of the review or not. Since an abstract usually summarizes a review, readers may therefore mostly rely on that abstract to judge the quality of the review as well as its methodological rigor. However, abstracts are sometimes poorly written and may therefore give a misleading and even harmful picture of the reviews’ contents. To assess abstracts, we propose a measure that allows quantifying the systematicity of reviews’ abstracts i.e., the extent to which these abstracts exhibit good reporting quality. Experiments on 151 reviews published in the software engineering (SE) field showed that these reviews’ abstracts exhibit a suboptimal systematicity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.515 | 0.722 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.013 | 0.025 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.079 | 0.049 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".