# A Tertiary Study for Process Mining
## 3 Results--Findings
### Data Synthesis
#### 3.1.4 RQ4: What Are the Demographics of Published SMSs/SLRs in Process Mining?  
Number of SMSs/SLRs Published Annually  
Most of the studies (eight) were published in 2022. This denotes an increased interest in published PM studies compared to previous years. In the earlier years covered by this research (Table 9), the number of SMSs/SLRs was smaller as expected, since the domain was relatively new and research in this field was therefore limited. With the increase in the number of primary studies, there was an opportunity to summarize and map the research performed in PM. Around 2018 it was observed that six SMSs/S  
are no specific trends in publishing venues, there seems to be a trend in the geographical areas where the studies are being conducted. The primary authors were distributed within the five continents (Figure 6). Nine studies (36%) emerged from Asian countries (Turkey, China, Iran, Indonesia, Japan, and Malaysia), seven studies (28%) emerged from European countries (Estonia, Spain, the UK, Italy, Belgium, and Czechia), and the rest of the studies were developed in America (five studies in South America (Brazil and Chile) and three studies in North America (Canada and Mexico)), with one in Africa (Egypt). Turkey and Brazil are leading the research in SMS/SLR studies in process mining, as they have published three studies each that are included in this work. It is also worth mentioning that there are no SMSs/SLRs from the USA. This observation has also been noted in the tertiary study of [PERSON] et al. [23]. The thematic findings underscore process mining's extensive applications across domains such as healthcare, cybersecurity, and agile software development, showing its broad impact.  
Which Are the Most Cited Papers in This Area?  
The extracted data (Table 5) provide some interesting observations regarding the number of citations for the SMSs/SLRs included in this study. The citation numbers were extracted from Google Scholar on 7 March 2023, as other tertiary studies have used Google Scholar to provide an indication of how many times a paper has been cited (cite landscaping and more). Secondary studies in the PM domain have received a total of  
Figure 6: A worldwide distribution of secondary studies in Process Mining (Figure created using MS Excel map representation of data).  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline
**Year** & **Number of Studies** & **Research Domain (s)** \\ \hline
2016 & 3 & Healthcare \\
2017 & 2 & Process Mining areas \\  & & Healthcare \\
2018 & 6 & Process Mining areas \\  & & Agile software development \\  & & Process Mining areas \\
2019 & 2 & Cloud-based applications \\  & & Process Mining areas \\
2020 & 3 & Industrial applications \\
2021 & 1 & Software Engineering \\  & & Healthcare \\
2022 & 8 & Process Mining areas \\  & & Cybersecurity \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 9: Number of studies and thematic areas covered per year.  
1658 citations. The average number of citations for secondary studies in PM is 66. For the studies included in our work, studies of higher quality are not always cited more often. In addition, recently published works, such as S21, can be frequently cited, although most of the recently published work has yet to receive a high number of citations. The papers published in journals have received 795 citations, whereas the papers published in conferences have received more citations, with a total of 863.  
Future work could further compare the citation numbers (individual and average numbers) to those of SMSs/SLRs in other fields and/or in the overall PM domain. It has also been observed that studies published in peer-reviewed journals usually receive more citations than the studies published in conferences. However, since several studies have been published in the past 2 years, it is still too early to assess the validity of this observation.