ReviQ: A systematic literature review workbench

We present ReviQ, an open-source workbench for systematic literature reviews (SLRs) that runs locally in Docker and does not require cloud accounts. The tool implements all eight phases of the Kitchenham and Charters (2007) methodology: project setup, BibTeX import with cross-database deduplication, title/abstract screening, full-text eligibility, snowballing with saturation tracking, quality assessment, configurable data extraction, and results visualization, including PRISMA 2020 flow diagrams. Reviewer agreement is quantified through Cohen’s κ with asymptotic confidence intervals and PABAK, which is computed directly from the stored decisions. The complete project state—decisions, conflict resolutions, QA scores, extraction records, taxonomies, and source BibTeX files—can be exported as a versioned replication package and re-imported into another ReviQ instance, enabling third parties to audit or continue a review. We validated ReviQ by conducting a complete SLR on a software engineering topic across five databases, four snowballing iterations, 519 retrieved and 356 screened papers, involving two reviewers and resulting in 40 included studies. ReviQ is released under the GPL v3 license.

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Publication Details

Journal
SoftwareX
Published
2026-06-18
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2026.102814
Primary Topic
Scientific Computing and Data Management
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

ReviQ: A systematic literature review workbench

Philipp Haindl
SoftwareX
Scientific Computing and Data Management
article

ReviQ: A systematic literature review workbench

Philipp Haindl
article en

Abstract

We present ReviQ, an open-source workbench for systematic literature reviews (SLRs) that runs locally in Docker and does not require cloud accounts. The tool implements all eight phases of the Kitchenham and Charters (2007) methodology: project setup, BibTeX import with cross-database deduplication, title/abstract screening, full-text eligibility, snowballing with saturation tracking, quality assessment, configurable data extraction, and results visualization, including PRISMA 2020 flow diagrams. Reviewer agreement is quantified through Cohen’s κ with asymptotic confidence intervals and PABAK, which is computed directly from the stored decisions. The complete project state—decisions, conflict resolutions, QA scores, extraction records, taxonomies, and source BibTeX files—can be exported as a versioned replication package and re-imported into another ReviQ instance, enabling third parties to audit or continue a review. We validated ReviQ by conducting a complete SLR on a software engineering topic across five databases, four snowballing iterations, 519 retrieved and 356 screened papers, involving two reviewers and resulting in 40 included studies. ReviQ is released under the GPL v3 license.

SoftwareXVol. 35
University of Applied Sciences St Pölten (AT)
Partnerships for the goals
Openalex Percentile: Top 3%
Scientific Computing and Data Management
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