SCAS-AI: A Strategy to Semi-Automate the Initial Selection Task in Systematic Literature Reviews

Context: There are several initiatives to semi-automate the initial selection of studies task for Systematic Literature Reviews (SLR) to reduce effort and potential bias. Objective: We propose a strategy called SCAS-AI to semi-automate the initial selection task. This strategy improves the original SCAS strategy with Artificial Intelligence (AI) resources (fuzzy logic and genetic algorithm) for studies selection. Method: We evaluated the SCAS-AI strategy through a quasi-experiment with SLRs in Software Engineering (SE). Results: In general, the SCAS-AI strategy improved the results achieved using the original SCAS strategy in reducing the effort of the initial selection task. The effort reduction applying SCAS-AI was 39.1%. In addition, the errors percentage was 0.3% for studies automatically excluded (false negative – loss of evidence) and 3.3% for studies automatically included (false positive – evidence later excluded during the full-text reading). Conclusion: The results show the potential of the investigated AI techniques to support the initial selection task for SLRs in SE.