  A systematic literature review (SLR) is a methodology used to find and
aggregate all relevant existing evidence about a specific research question of
interest. Important decisions need to be made at several points in the review
process, relating to search of the literature, selection of relevant primary
studies and use of methods of synthesis. Visualization can support tasks that
involve large collections of data, such as the studies collected, evaluated and
summarized in an SLR. The objective of this paper is to present the results of
a systematic mapping study (SM) conducted to collect and evaluate evidence on
the use of a specific visualization technique, visual data mining (VDM), to
support the SLR process. We reviewed 20 papers and our results indicate a
scarcity of research on the use of VDM to help with conducting SLRs in the
software engineering domain. However, most of the studies (16 of the 20 studies
included in our mapping) have been conducted in the field of medicine and they
revealed that the activities of data extraction and data synthesis, related to
conducting the review phase of an SLR process, have more VDM support than other
activities. In contrast, according to our SM, previous studies using VDM
techniques with SLRs have not employed such techniques during the SLR's
planning and reporting phases.
