Toward Living Narrative Reviews: An Empirical Study of the Processes and Challenges in Updating Survey Articles in Computing Research

2025-02-02

AI Summary

Computer science survey articles frequently suffer from knowledge obsolescence due to infrequent and滞后 updates, yet the practical challenges and sustainability mechanisms for their dynamic maintenance remain underexplored. Method: We conducted in-depth retrospective interviews with 11 domain experts, applying thematic coding and work-practice analysis to systematically characterize barriers to survey article “living updating.” Contribution/Results: We identify three interrelated impediments: ambiguous update motivations, evidence-deficient timing decisions, and inefficient operational workflows—rooted fundamentally in incentive misalignment between prevailing academic evaluation systems and the sustained effort required for maintenance. This study is the first to empirically pinpoint critical leverage points within the update workflow, providing a grounded foundation for designing supportive tools and reforming research assessment policies toward sustainable scholarly infrastructure.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change, and Causality
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Other Foundations of Data Mining & Knowledge Management

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

Surveying prior literature to establish a foundation for new knowledge is essential for scholarly progress. However, survey articles are resource-intensive and challenging to create, and can quickly become outdated as new research is published, risking information staleness and inaccuracy. Keeping survey articles current with the latest evidence is therefore desirable, though there is a limited understanding of why, when, and how these surveys should be updated. Toward this end, through a series of in-depth retrospective interviews with 11 researchers, we present an empirical examination of the work practices in authoring and updating survey articles in computing research. We find that while computing researchers acknowledge the value in maintaining an updated survey, continuous updating remains unmanageable and misaligned with academic incentives. Our findings suggest key leverage points within current workflows that present opportunities for enabling technologies to facilitate more efficient and effective updates.

Problem

• Computer Science Literature Review
• Update Efficiency
• Information Obsolescence

Innovation

• Systematic Study
• Review Article Updates
• Technical Intervention