How Often and What StackOverflow Posts Do Developers Reference in Their GitHub Projects?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Stack Overflow (SO) is a popular Q&A forum for software developers, providing a large number of copyable code snippets. While GitHub is an independent code collaboration platform, developers often reuse SO code in their GitHub projects. In this paper, we investigate how often GitHub developers re-use code snippets from the SO forum, as well as what concepts they are more likely to reference in their code. To accomplish our goal, we mine SOTorrent dataset that provides connectivity between code snippets on the SO posts with software projects hosted on GitHub. We then study the characteristics of GitHub projects that reference SO posts and what popular SO discussions can be found in GitHub projects. Our results demonstrate that on average developers make 45 references to SO posts in their projects, with the highest number of references being made within the JavaScript code. We also found that 79% of the SO posts with code snippets that are referenced in GitHub code do change over time (at least ones) raising code maintainability and reliability concerns.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".