Table 1 Organization scheme of DS questionnaire
Section | Type of data | Variables |
|---|---|---|
Demographic data | Range, not an exact value; in order to minimize a chance to identify participants | Age, gender, years of experience in conducting SRs, number of conducted SRs, number of SRs that they have led, role/s in conducting SRs, and area of employment |
Prioritisation | (1) 5-point Likert scale mandatory question regarding whether the step is time/effort/resource-intensive and should be prioritized in future research concerning methods of development and automation Participants were offered fixed statements that a particular step needs to be prioritized in future research and an open-ended field. For each statement, participants had to rate how strongly they agree that the topic is important to include (1—“strongly disagree”, 2—“disagree”, 3—“indifferent”, 4—“agree” and 5—“strongly agree”, “I do not know”) (2) Participants were encouraged to provide arguments for the ratings through open responses | Steps of SR production: (1) project management, (2) formulating the review question, (3) finding previous SRs, (4) writing the protocol, (5) constructing the search strategy, (6) literature searching, (7) de-duplicating, (8) screening abstracts, (9) obtaining full-text, (10) screening full-texts, (11) snowballing-citation chasing/tracking, (12) translating non-English studies into English, (13) extracting data, (14) critically appraising, (15) synthesizing data, (16) GRADE-ing (https://www.gradeworkinggroup.org/)– going from evidence to decision, (17) updating the review to see whether some new studies were published between the search date and the final version of the article, (18) performing a meta-analysis, and (19) writing up the review* |
Qualitative section | Open-ended long text field (non-mandatory question) in which participants were invited to freely discuss any issue they find important in that step. Participants were encouraged to provide as many opinions as they felt appropriate | (1) How the methodology of producing SRs can be improved, (2) areas that should be prioritized in future research, and (3) other issues considered important regarding SRs’ production and updating |