The DOI matches its Crossref record; 37 of the 38 references it cites were found in a registry or an index, and 1 are not checked yet.
Pitfalls and guidelines for using time-based Git data
Open accessAbstract
Many software engineering research papers rely on time-based data (e.g., commit timestamps, issue report creation/update/close dates, release dates). Like most real-world data however, time-based data is often dirty. To date, there are no studies that quantify how frequently such data is used by the software engineering research community, or investigate sources of and quantify how often such data is dirty. Depending on the research task and method used, including such dirty data could affect the research results. This paper presents an extended survey of papers that utilize time-based data, published in the Mining Software Repositories (MSR) conference series. Out of the 754 technical track and data papers published in MSR 2004–2021, we saw at least 290 (38%) papers utilized time-based data. We also observed that most time-based data used in research papers comes in the form of Git commits, often from GitHub. Based on those results, we then used the Boa and Software Heritage infrastructures to help identify and quantify several sources of dirty Git timestamp data. Finally we provide guidelines/best practices for researchers utilizing time-based data from Git repositories.
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Citations
Cites
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The promises and perils of mining git
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An in-depth study of the promises and perils of mining GitHub
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A Large-Scale Study About Quality and Reproducibility of Jupyter Notebooks
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On the suitability of hugging face hub for empirical studies
Ait, A., Izquierdo, J. L., & Cabot, J. (2025) · Empirical Software Engineering · doi:10.1007/s10664-024-10608-8 · Cited by 21
Replicability Study: Corpora For Understanding Simulink Models & Projects
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OpenLambdaVerse: A Dataset and Analysis of Open-Source Serverless Applications
Moreno, Á. C. C., & Abad, C. L. (2025) · IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering · doi:10.1109/ic2e65552.2025.00032 · Cited by 5
Altered Histories in Version Control System Repositories: Evidence from the Trenches
Rapaport, S., Pautet, L., Tardieu, S., & Zacchiroli, S. (2025) · IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) · doi:10.1109/ase63991.2025.00181 · Cited by 3
Does the Tool Matter? Exploring Some Causes of Threats to Validity in Mining Software Repositories
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EvoScat: Exploring Software Change Dynamics in Large-Scale Historical Datasets
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QModel: A Time-Aware GitHub Mining Framework for Empirical Software Quality Studies
Polishchuk, D. (2026) · DROPS (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics) · doi:10.4230/lipics.esem.2026.56
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how has the rise of Chatgpt impacted Github users? - analysing organisational user activity
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VCAligner: Aligning Source Distribution Versions with Upstream Git Commits to Secure Supply Chain
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Metadata
- Authors
- Flint, S. W., Chauhan, J., & Dyer, R.
- Affiliations
- University of Nebraska–Lincoln (US)
- Corresponding author
- Flint, Samuel W.
- Venue
- Empirical Software Engineering
- Published
- 2022-10-06
- Volume
- 27
- Issue
- 7
- ISSN
- 1382-3256 (ISSN-L)
- 1573-7616
- OpenAlex
- W4302293071
- Cited by
- 9
- References
- 37
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 6 · 2023: 2
- FWCI
- 1.71
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- arxiv.org
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- www.springer.com/tdm (vor)
- Locations
- Empirical Software Engineering (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- Lincoln (University of Nebraska) (submittedVersion)
- Lincoln (University of Nebraska) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-sa)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Open Source Software Innovations
- Keywords
- dirty data, data provenance, GitHub, Software Heritage, Boas, software repositories
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