ReviQ: A systematic literature review workbench
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.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Scientific Computing and Data Management
Research Data Management Practices
Academic Publishing and Open Access
Publication details
- Journal / source
- SoftwareX
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Volume
- 35
- Pages
- 102814–102814
- Publication date
- 18 June 2026
- Language
- EN