Crowdsourced Knowledge on Stack Overflow: A Systematic Mapping Study

Platforms such as Stack Overflow are available for software practitioners to solicit help and solutions to their challenges and knowledge needs. This community's practices have in recent times however caused quality-related concerns. Academic work tends to provide validation for the practice and processes of these forums, however, previous work did not review the scale of scientific attention that is given to this cause. We conducted a Systematic Mapping study involving 266 papers from six relevant databases to address this gap. In this preliminary work we explored the level of academic interest Stack Overflow has generated, the publication venues, the topics studied and approaches used. Outcomes show that Stack Overflow has attracted increasing research interest, with topics relating to both community dynamics and human factors, and technical issues. In addition, research studies have been largely evaluative or proposed solutions, though this latter approach tends to lack validation. This signals the need for future work to explore the nature of Stack Overflow research contributions that are provided, and their quality. We outline our research agenda for continuing with such efforts.