Analysis of Academic Databases for Literature Review in the Computer Science Education Field

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Literature review is a fundamental part of a research process, and systematic protocols for this activity have been used for a long time, mainly in the field of health. Specifically in the Computer Science Education area, the use of systematic literature review has grown. One of the steps in a systematic literature review (SLR) is the selection of academic databases in which to search for articles. There are several databases with academic documents that may be relevant to SLR, for example: Google Scholar, which indexes different types of documents, such as articles, dissertations, theses, and others; Scopus and Web of Science are large databases that index articles from different conferences and journals. ACM Digital Library and IEEE Xplore are also important sources of information in the field of Computer Education. These tools have different characteristics, some charge a fee, others have only information about the title and authors and do not have access to the full article, others have advanced features, with many filters. In this context, this article presents the following research questions: RQ1) What metadata can be extracted automatically from the databases?; RQ2) What kind of visualization tools are available?; RQ3) Do the documents returned by the databases cover the research topic?; RQ4) Do the databases have papers from the main CSE venues?; and RQ5) How many databases are required to perform a literature review in CSE? To answer these questions we used five academic databases: Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science, ACM Digital Library, and IEEE xplore. Regarding the results, Scopus and Web of Science have the best visualization of the documents and a robust query engine, however those academic databases are not free. ACM Digital library, IEEE Xplore, Scopus and Web of Science allow the automatic download of the papers’ metadata (author, title, abstract, affiliation and others). Specifically in the field of Computer Science Education, the ACM Digital Library and the IEEE Xplore have important papers from conferences (SIGCSE and FIE) and journals (ACM Transaction on Education and IEEE Transaction on Education). In this full paper, the results will be presented to help researchers to choose the most appropriate academic databases based on their requirements and available options.