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This systematic mapping study analyzes 56 papers on Human-Centered Requirements Engineering (HC-RE) to understand how multidisciplinary contributions are structured and why fragmentation persists. The analysis reveals two distinct integration pathways: a Cognitive-Formal (C-F) pathway focused on goal-based frameworks and formal modeling, and a Participatory-Iterative (P-I) pathway focused on scenario-based frameworks and iterative design. The key finding is a structural separation between these pathways, resulting in lifecycle concentration and a theory-practice gap due to the lack of translation mechanisms between human-centered artifacts and formal RE specifications.
HC-RE's persistent lifecycle concentration and theory-practice gap stems from a surprising disconnect between two parallel integration traditions: Cognitive-Formal and Participatory-Iterative pathways.
Human-centered Requirements Engineering (HC-RE) integrates user cognition, emotions, and social interactions into the RE process through contributions from disciplines such as psychology, cognitive science, design thinking, and human-computer interaction. Despite growing interest, how these multidisciplinary contributions are structured and why they remain fragmented across the RE lifecycle is not well understood. This systematic mapping study analyzes 56 primary studies across seven dimensions, including RE phases, user involvement techniques, contributing disciplines, and evaluation methods. Results show that 70\% of approaches involve multidisciplinary contributions, yet only 39% have been empirically evaluated and 48% address only the elicitation phase. A cross-study analysis reveals a structural separation between two parallel integration traditions: a Cognitive-Formal (C-F) pathway grounded in goal-based frameworks and formal modeling, and a Participatory-Iterative (P-I) pathway grounded in scenario-based frameworks and iterative design. Each pathway has developed complementary strengths, but their near-total disconnection explains the persistent lifecycle concentration and theory-practice gap observed in the corpus. The findings identify the absence of translation mechanisms between human-centered artifacts and formal RE specifications as the field's primary structural gap, provide a structured research agenda organized into four priority tiers, and establish the empirical foundation for Experience-Centered Requirements Engineering, a direction in which user experience is explicitly operationalized as a first-class concern in requirements specification.