Beyond the Spreadsheet: Reflections on Tool Support for Literature Studies

Background: Even though a number of tools are reported to be used by researchers undertaking systematic reviews, important shortages are still reported revealing how such solutions are unable to satisfy current needs.
Method: Two research groups independently provided a design for a tool supporting systematic reviews. The resulting tools were assessed against the feature lists provided by prior research.
Results: After presenting an overview of the tools and the core design decisions taken, we provide a feature analysis and a discussion regarding selected challenges deemed crucial to provide a proper tool support.
Conclusions: Although the designed solutions do not yet support the entire systematic review process, their architecture has been designed to be flexible and extendable. After highlighting the difficulties of developing appropriate tools, we call for action: developing tools to support systematic reviews is a community project