On the Popularity of GitHub Applications: A Preliminary Note
This provides a method for developers and users to compare and track software popularity on GitHub, but it is incremental as it builds on existing metrics like stars.
The authors tackled the problem of assessing the popularity of GitHub repositories by proposing a framework based on star counts and growth patterns, showing that stars correlate with forks and usage by third-party programs using real GitHub data.
GitHub is the world's largest collection of open source software. Therefore, it is important both to software developers and users to compare and track the popularity of GitHub repositories. In this paper, we propose a framework to assess the popularity of GitHub software, using their number of stars. We also propose a set of popularity growth patterns, which describe the evolution of the number of stars of a system over time. We show that stars tend to correlate with other measures, like forks, and with the effective usage of GitHub software by third-party programs. Throughout the paper we illustrate the application of our framework using real data extracted from GitHub.