This document summarizes research on GitHub from academic publications indexed in Scopus: - Over 1,000 scholarly publications per year mention GitHub in the title, keywords or abstract, with computer science, bioinformatics and mathematics most common subjects. - The US, UK, China, Germany, Canada and France publish the most research on GitHub. - The earliest and most cited publication is from 2012 and examines transparency and collaboration on GitHub.

1. Visualizing scholarly research on
GitHub
using Scopus
May 2018
1

2. In a nutshell…..
• Academic research on GitHub began to
take off in 2012.
• In 2017 and 2018 there will be over 1,000
scholarly publications on GitHub per year
(in title, keywords, abstract).
• Computer science, bioinformatics, and
mathematics dominate.
• USA, UK, China, Germany, Canada and
France are the leaders.
2

3. “GitHub” in article title, keyword or abstract.
English language sources only
3
As of May
21, there
were 501 in
2018.

4. Sources
4

5. Authors
Text box
5

6. Affiliation. #1 CNRS is in Paris, France
Text box
6
U of Tokyo is
ranked No.13
(37
publications).

7. By country or territory. Japan is ranked #12.
Text box
7

8. By document type
Text box
8

9. By subject area
Text box
9
Biochemistry,
Genetics,
Molecular
biology

10. “GitHub” in title produces 193 results (as of
May 2018)
• Among these, the very first one is…(has
been cited 277 times)
Dabbish, L., Stuart, C., Tsay, J., & Herbsleb,
J. (2012). Social coding in GitHub:
Transparency and collaboration in an open
software repository. In Proceedings of the
ACM Conference on Computer Supported
Cooperative Work, CSCW (pp. 1277–1286).
https://doi.org/10.1145/2145204.2145396
10

11. Dabbish, L., Stuart, C., Tsay, J., & Herbsleb, J. (2012).
11
“Social applications on the web let users track and follow the
activities of a large number of others regardless of location or
affiliation. There is a potential for this transparency to radically
improve collaboration and learning in complex knowledge-
based activities. Based on a series of in-depth interviews with
central and peripheral GitHub users, we examined the value
of transparency for large-scale distributed collaborations and
communities of practice. We find that people make a
surprisingly rich set of social inferences from the networked
activity information in GitHub, such as inferring someone
else's technical goals and vision when they edit code, or
guessing which of several similar projects has the best chance
of thriving in the long term. Users combine these inferences
into effective strategies for coordinating work, advancing
technical skills and managing their reputation.”

12. “GitHub” in title produces 193 results.
Five most cited (as of May 2018)
• Dabbish, L., Stuart, C., Tsay, J., & Herbsleb, J. (2012).
• Kalliamvakou, E., Singer, L., Gousios, G., German, D. M., Blincoe, K., &
Damian, D. (2014). The promises and perils of mining GitHub. In 11th
Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2014 -
Proceedings (pp. 92–101). https://doi.org/10.1145/2597073.2597074
• Tsay, J., Dabbish, L., & Herbsleb, J. (2014). Influence of social and
technical factors for evaluating contribution in GitHub. In Proceedings -
International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 356–366).
https://doi.org/10.1145/2568225.2568315
• Vasilescu, B., Filkov, V., & Serebrenik, A. (2013). StackOverflow and
GitHub: Associations between software development and crowdsourced
knowledge. In Proceedings -
SocialCom/PASSAT/BigData/EconCom/BioMedCom 2013 (pp. 188–
195). https://doi.org/10.1109/SocialCom.2013.35
• Gousios, G., & Spinellis, D. (2012). GHTorrent: Github’s data from a
firehose. In IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software
Repositories (pp. 12–21). https://doi.org/10.1109/MSR.2012.6224294
12

13. “GitHub” in title. The latest publications (2018).
• Liao, Z., Jin, H., Li, Y., Zhao, B., Wu, J., & Shengzong, L. (2018). DevRank: Mining
influential developers in Github. In 2017 IEEE Global Communications Conference,
GLOBECOM 2017 - Proceedings (Vol. 2018–Janua, pp. 1–6).
https://doi.org/10.1109/GLOCOM.2017.8255005
• Treude, C., Leite, L., & Aniche, M. (2018). Unusual events in GitHub repositories. Journal
of Systems and Software, 142, 237–247. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2018.04.063
• Liao, Z., Dayu, H., Chen, Z., Fan, X., Zhang, Y., & Liu, S. (2018). Exploring the
Characteristics of Issue-related Behaviors in GitHub Using Visualization Techniques.
IEEE Access. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2810295
• Hu, Y., Wang, S., Ren, Y., & Choo, K.-K. R. (2018). User influence analysis for Github
developer social networks. Expert Systems with Applications, 108, 108–118.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2018.05.002
• Sun, X., Xu, W., Xia, X., Chen, X., & Li, B. (2018). Personalized project recommendation
on GitHub. Science China Information Sciences, 61(5). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-
017-9419-x
• Luo, Q., Moran, K., Zhang, L., & Poshyvanyk, D. (2018). How Do Static and Dynamic Test
Case Prioritization Techniques Perform on Modern Software Systems? An Extensive
Study on GitHub Projects. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2018.2822270
• Singh, N., & Singh, P. (2018). How Do Code Refactoring Activities Impact Software
Developers’ Sentiments? - An Empirical Investigation into GitHub Commits. In
Proceedings - Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, APSEC (Vol. 2017–Decem,
pp. 648–653). https://doi.org/10.1109/APSEC.2017.79
• Wu, Y., Kropczynski, J., Prates, R., & Carroll, J. M. (2018). Understanding how GitHub
supports curation repositories. Future Internet, 10(3). https://doi.org/10.3390/fi10030029
• Lu, Y., Mao, X., Li, Z., Zhang, Y., Wang, T., & Yin, G. (2018). Internal quality assurance for
external contributions in GitHub: An empirical investigation. Journal of Software: Evolution
and Process, 30(4). https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.1918 13