Research Knowledge Graphs for Sustainable Literature Reviews in Software Engineering and Beyond

In this extended abstract, we present the ongoing work of several researchers on using research knowledge graphs (RKGs) for sustainable literature reviews (LRs) in software engineering (SE) and beyond. SE and academia face a significant increase in secondary studies and, in particular, LRs due to the ever-increasing number of publications. Most LRs are not sustainable as they do not build on previous ones due to the unavailability of extracted and analyzed data. Our ongoing work aims to address the challenge of conducting sustainable LRs by utilizing RKGs to ensure their data is FAIR, open, and long-term available. We developed and still refine an approach for using the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), one representative RKG, as a technical infrastructure for sustainable LRs, based on the KG-EmpiRE use case, which organizes empirical research in requirements engineering. The KG-EmpiRE use case demonstrates the applicability of our approach for conducting sustainable LRs by building, publishing, maintaining, updating, and analyzing a knowledge graph of empirical research in requirements engineering in the ORKG. The use of ORKG and RKGs in general can significantly enhance the sustainability of LRs, promote collaboration and updating of LRs, and ensure the quality, reliability, and timeliness of their research results through improved archiving, retrieval, replication, and (re-)use.