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Analysis of institutional authors

Herraiz, IsraelAuthor

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June 9, 2019
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Studying the laws of software evolution in a long-lived FLOSS project

Publicated to: Journal of software: Evolution and Process. 26 (7): 589-612 - 2014-07-01 26(7), DOI: 10.1002/smr.1615

Authors:

Gonzalez-Barahona, JM; Robles, G; Herraiz, I; Ortega, F
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Affiliations

Univ Politecn Madrid - Author
Univ Rey Juan Carlos, GSyC LibreSoft - Author

Abstract

Some free, open-source software projects have been around for quite a long time, the longest living ones dating from the early 1980s. For some of them, detailed information about their evolution is available in source code management systems tracking all their code changes for periods of more than 15 years. This paper examines in detail the evolution of one of such projects, glibc, with the main aim of understanding how it evolved and how it matched Lehman's laws of software evolution. As a result, we have developed a methodology for studying the evolution of such long-lived projects based on the information in their source code management repository, described in detail several aspects of the history of glibc, including some activity and size metrics, and found how some of the laws of software evolution may not hold in this case. (C) 2013 The Authors. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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Keywords

free softwaremining software repositoriesopen source softwaresoftware evolutionFree softwareLife-cycleLinux kernelMining software repositoriesModelOpen source softwareSoftware evolutionSource code management systemSystems

Quality index

Bibliometric impact. Analysis of the contribution and dissemination channel

The work has been published in the journal Journal of software: Evolution and Process due to its progression and the good impact it has achieved in recent years, according to the agency Scopus (SJR), it has become a reference in its field. In the year of publication of the work, 2014, it was in position , thus managing to position itself as a Q2 (Segundo Cuartil), in the category Software. Notably, the journal is positioned en el Cuartil Q4 for the agency WoS (JCR) in the category Computer Science, Software Engineering.

From a relative perspective, and based on the normalized impact indicator calculated from World Citations provided by WoS (ESI, Clarivate), it yields a value for the citation normalization relative to the expected citation rate of: 1.17. This indicates that, compared to works in the same discipline and in the same year of publication, it ranks as a work cited above average. (source consulted: ESI Nov 13, 2025)

Specifically, and according to different indexing agencies, this work has accumulated citations as of 2026-04-24, the following number of citations:

  • WoS: 25
  • Scopus: 22
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Impact and social visibility

From the perspective of influence or social adoption, and based on metrics associated with mentions and interactions provided by agencies specializing in calculating the so-called "Alternative or Social Metrics," we can highlight as of 2026-04-24:

  • The use, from an academic perspective evidenced by the Altmetric agency indicator referring to aggregations made by the personal bibliographic manager Mendeley, gives us a total of: 37.
  • The use of this contribution in bookmarks, code forks, additions to favorite lists for recurrent reading, as well as general views, indicates that someone is using the publication as a basis for their current work. This may be a notable indicator of future more formal and academic citations. This claim is supported by the result of the "Capture" indicator, which yields a total of: 37 (PlumX).

With a more dissemination-oriented intent and targeting more general audiences, we can observe other more global scores such as:

  • The Total Score from Altmetric: 3.
  • The number of mentions on the social network X (formerly Twitter): 4 (Altmetric).

It is essential to present evidence supporting full alignment with institutional principles and guidelines on Open Science and the Conservation and Dissemination of Intellectual Heritage. A clear example of this is:

  • The work has been submitted to a journal whose editorial policy allows open Open Access publication.
  • Assignment of a Handle/URN as an identifier within the deposit in the Institutional Repository: https://oa.upm.es/21355/

As a result of the publication of the work in the institutional repository, statistical usage data has been obtained that reflects its impact. In terms of dissemination, we can state that, as of

  • Views: 417
  • Downloads: 355
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Awards linked to the item

The work of Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, Gregorio Robles, and Felipe Ortega in the study presented in this paper has been funded in part by the European Commission under project ALERT (FP7-IST-25809) and by the Spanish Government under project SobreSale (TIN2011-28110). We thank the developers of glibc for the care in the maintenance of their SCM repository, for enabling this study by making it publicly available, and for developing glibc itself over such a long period of time. We also thank the reviewers of this paper for their help in improving the final version.
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