# A Tertiary Study for Process Mining
## 4 Discussion  
The aim of this study was to answer a set of research questions and cover the SLRs and SMSs published in PM up to March 2023. This study identifies current trends and reports on the quality and demographics of the studies included. We followed the same methodology as an SLR based on the guidelines proposed by [PERSON] [12] and [PERSON] et al. [26]. The quality of each secondary study is assessed using the DARE criteria [27] to provide an analysis of the overall quality of the studies published in this field, both as journal and conference papers. To ensure that the findings of this study have been appropriately reported, the checklist and guidelines proposed by [PERSON] et al. [28] have been followed. In total, 25 secondary studies published in PM are reviewed in this work. Thirteen studies are journal papers, and twelve studies are conference papers. This section discusses the implications of this study. The diverse thematic areas indicate the broad applicability of process mining across multiple research domains, emphasizing its potential for growth in underexplored areas. PM research interest is found in the technologies and applications of PM, healthcare, cybersecurity, and agile software development. Most of the studies included in this tertiary study fall under the PM areas (technologies and applications) and healthcare. The areas covered in secondary studies have matured more in terms of scientific research and applications in PM; thus, there are enough published works to create the need for secondary research in these fields. However, as PM is now a mature research domain, future secondary studies in this field could focus on other areas of research. The studies usually provide a thematic analysis based on various characteristics, with the most used usually being PM algorithms, PM tools, and research questions posed. Although other domains in software engineering have a classification in place that secondary studies can exploit, there is no classification set in the literature so far for PM. Regarding RQ2, the quality analysis of the included secondary studies was performed using DARE criteria [27]. Overall, the quality assessment indicates that the majority of SMSs/SLRs in process mining maintain a consistent medium-to-high quality level (>3.5), suggesting a robust research framework in this field. There are eight studies that scored more than 4 in the quality assessment (S1, S4, S7, S8, S17, S19, S20, and S24). Five of these were published in journals and the rest are conference papers. In general, only two of the studies (S1 and S19) performed a partial quality assessment for the included primary studies. In two more studies (S17 and S20), the quality criterion is met (scoring 1). In total, 21 of the included studies do not perform any quality assessment on the primary studies. As discussed in [24], this is an important factor to consider in the future that will also contribute to increasing the quality score of the secondary studies produced. Our analysis indicates that journal and conference papers show comparable quality, with slight variations observed over recent years. By taking a closer look at the included studies, it is also observed that although the quality score for conference papers has increased in the past years (from 3.3 in 2020 to 3.45 in 2023), it has slightly decreased for journal papers (from 3.7 in 2020 to 3.5 in 2023). Given the small number of secondary studies published in the past 2 years, no generic conclusions can be drawn regarding the progress of the quality score over the years. Finally, we compared the quality score of journal papers and open-access papers to reveal that for the studies included in this tertiary study, the papers published in open-access journals are of higher average quality than those published in subscription journals. The open-access studies hold an average quality score of 3.9, with a gap of 0.65 in the average quality score from the rest of the studies that were published in journals.