  The evidence-based approach has increasingly been employed to synthesize
empirical findings from the primary research in software engineering.
Nevertheless, the reproducibility of evidence-based software engineering (EBSE)
studies seems to be underemphasized. In our investigation into the automatic
search of 311 sample studies, more than 50% of the search strings are not
reusable; about 87.5% of the search activities (e.g., search field settings)
are unrepeatable; and more than 95% of the whole automatic search
implementations are unreproducible. Considering that searching is a cornerstone
of an EBSE study, we are afraid that the reproducibility of the current
secondary research could be worse than we can imagine. By analyzing and
reporting the root causes of the aforementioned observations, we urge
collaboration and cooperation among all the stakeholders in our community to
improve the research reproducibility in EBSE.
