What's in a GitHub Star? Understanding Repository Starring Practices in a Social Coding Platform¶

Borges, H., & Tulio Valente, M. (2018). What's in a GitHub Star? Understanding Repository Starring Practices in a Social Coding Platform. Journal of Systems and Software, 146, 112-129.

Type: Journal article
Intellectual base: Primary research
Year: 2018
Volume: 146
Pages: 112-129
DOI: 10.1016/j.jss.2018.09.016
DOI registrant: Elsevier
Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2018.09.016
Cited from: library_information_science

Cited by¶

1 citation across 1 artifact.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes¶

Salience-as-Significance
- Open-source software. Stars, downloads, and "trending" status read as production-readiness, when they measure interested-attention frequency shaped by marketing and fashion.
  This sourceEmpirically shows GitHub stars measure popularity/visibility and developer interest (three in four developers check star counts before using a project), not production-readiness or quality.
  
  Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
  
  Survey and star-growth study of GitHub repositories: stars track popularity and promotion, many developers use them as a selection signal, though several say they do not reflect quality.
  
  “this selection may favor projects with active marketing and advertising strategies, instead of projects following well-established software engineering practices.”
  From the work's full text.
  
  Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Verification¶

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