A Longitudinal Analysis of Good First Issue Practices and Newcomer Pull Requests in Popular OSS Projects
For OSS maintainers and researchers, it reveals a widening gap between stable newcomer interest in GFIs and declining availability and success of GFI-based onboarding, highlighting the need for sustained labeling and review support.
This study analyzes 406,826 issues and 1,117 newcomer GFI pull requests across 37 popular GitHub repositories from 2021 to 2025, finding a significant decline in GFI-labeled issues starting in January 2024 and a drop in newcomer pull request merge rates from 61.9% to 42.2%, despite stable newcomer engagement at ~27%.
Open-source software (OSS) projects rely on effective newcomer onboarding to sustain their communities. OSS projects widely adopt "good first issue" (GFI) labels to highlight beginner-friendly tasks. As development practices continue to evolve, understanding how these onboarding mechanisms change over time is important for both maintainers and researchers. This study analyzes 406,826 issues and 1,117 newcomer GFI pull requests across 37 popular GitHub repositories (30 of which use GFI labels) over a four-year period from July 2021 to June 2025. We find that while the proportion of issues with GFI labels remained stable during the first three years, it underwent a statistically significant decline beginning in January 2024, with substantial variation across projects not explained by repository age or programming language. Despite this supply-side decline, newcomer engagement with GFI issues remains stable at approximately 27%, suggesting that GFI labels maintain consistent attractiveness. Examining the outcomes of this engagement, we find that the merge rate of newcomer GFI pull requests declined from 61.9% to 42.2%. Initial pull request characteristics such as description length and code size show no significant association with merge outcomes, indicating that success is not predicted by the quantitative characteristics of the initial submission alone. Together, these findings reveal a widening gap between stable newcomer interest in GFIs and the declining availability and success of GFI-based onboarding, underscoring the need for maintainers to sustain both GFI labeling and review support.