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Cited by 312

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 33 of the 33 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Understanding the Factors That Impact the Popularity of GitHub Repositories

Open access
Borges, Hudson, Hora, Andre, Valente, Marco Tulio·2016·2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

Abstract

Software popularity is a valuable information to modern open source developers, who constantly want to know if their systems are attracting new users, if new releases are gaining acceptance, or if they are meeting user's expectations. In this paper, we describe a study on the popularity of software systems hosted at GitHub, which is the world's largest collection of open source software. GitHub provides an explicit way for users to manifest their satisfaction with a hosted repository: the stargazers button. In our study, we reveal the main factors that impact the number of stars of GitHub projects, including programming language and application domain. We also study the impact of new features on project popularity. Finally, we identify four main patterns of popularity growth, which are derived after clustering the time series representing the number of stars of 2,279 popular GitHub repositories. We hope our results provide valuable insights to developers and maintainers, which could help them on building and evolving systems in a competitive software market.

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Metadata

Authors
Borges, H., Hora, A., & Valente, M. T.
Venue
2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2016-10
Pages
334-344
OpenAlex
W2440056063
Cited by
312
References
33
FWCI
17.66
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Understanding the Factors That Impact the Popularity of GitHub Repositories. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/icsme.2016.31
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Borges, H., Hora, A., & Valente, M. T. (2016). Understanding the Factors That Impact the Popularity of GitHub Repositories. 2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME). https://doi.org/10.1109/icsme.2016.31

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Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.