## 3 An Approach to Support the Systematicity Assessment
### A Checklist-Based Approach to Quantitatively Assess Review Abstracts  
In this paper, we chose to focus on the systematicity of abstracts because the abstract is one of the most important components of a systematic review given it usually synthesizes the content of the review. In this regard, [PERSON] et al. [4] and [PERSON] et al. [26] stated that after reading the information a review abstract provides, readers should be able to decide if they want to access the full content of the review or not. Furthermore, as [PERSON] [25] pointed out, the abstract is usually the only part of an article, e.g., a review, that a referee reads when choosing to accept the invitation made by an editor to review a manuscript. Besides, the abstract may be the only part of a review that most readers will read when forming an opinion on a research topic. As [PERSON] et al. [4] and [PERSON] et al. [26] pointed out, an abstract should, therefore, report the main information regarding the key objective(s) or question(s) that the review deals with. It should also specify the methods, results, and implications of the review findings. Besides, some readers, may only have access to a review abstract, e.g., in the case of journals that require a payment/subscription to access their articles. Before requesting the full content of a review, it is therefore critical for such readers to find in the abstract sufficient information about the main objective(s) or question(s) that the review addresses, methods, findings, and implications of the findings for future practice, policy, and future research. Besides, the keywords that are part of a review abstract are usually used to index the systematic review in bibliographic databases. It is, therefore, recommended to properly write abstracts so that they report keywords that accurately specify the review question, e.g., population, interventions, outcomes. However, as [PERSON] [25] pointed out, abstracts are sometimes poorly written, may lack crucial information, and may convey a biased and misleading overview of the review they summarize. Similar to the literature, e.g., [PERSON] et al. [19; 20], [PERSON] et al. [18], to assess the systematicity of the selected review abstracts, we analyzed them using a checklist-based approach. The latter relies on a set of eleven questions. We have inferred these questions from a thorough analysis of the literature focusing on existing reporting guidelines and procedures. In our work, we focused on:  
1. The analysis of reporting guidelines and procedures, including the PRISMA reporting guideline that was discussed in [PERSON] et al. [2; 4; 11], [PERSON] et al. [9] and [PERSON] et al. [26]. That analysis also focused on the reporting procedures discussed by [PERSON] [32], [PERSON] [33], [PERSON] [34], [PERSON] [35], [PERSON] [36], and [PERSON] [30]. 2. The analysis of references explaining how to properly write abstracts. These include: [25], the references describing the PRISMA 2020 for abstracts checklist (e.g., [2; 4])and the reference describing revisions that [PERSON] et al. [26] made to that abstract's checklist in the context of the software engineering field. From our analysis, we decided to mainly focus on PRISMA because it is a well-established reporting guideline that federates several existing reporting procedures used in several research areas, including computing. The PRISMA statement embeds several good reporting practices used in several disciplines including software engineering. The PRISMA 2020 checklist focuses on the adequate reporting of the whole systematic review, while the PRISMA 2020 for abstracts checklist focuses on the adequate reporting of the abstract of a review. [PERSON] et al. [26] further explained how to apply PRISMA 2020 in the software engineering field. In particular, [PERSON] et al. [26] provided supplementary explanations and examples of the SEGRESS (Software Engineering Guidelines for REporting Secondary Studies) items. These explanations of the SEGRESS items mainly focus on quantitative and qualitative systematic reviews.