# A Dataset for GitHub Repository Deduplication: Extended Description

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.02314 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02314/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [The Fools are Certain; the Wise are Doubtful: Exploring LLM Confidence in Code Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16131/) (2025)
- [Repo2Vec: A Comprehensive Embedding Approach for Determining Repository Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05112/) (2021)
- [An Audio-Visual Attention Based Multimodal Network for Fake Talking Face Videos Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05178/) (2022)
- [Light over Heavy: Automated Performance Requirements Quantification with Linguistic Inducement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03421/) (2025)
- [Topical: Learning Repository Embeddings from Source Code using Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09495/) (2022)
- [Good Tools are Half the Work: Tool Usage in Deep Learning Projects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19124/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

GitHub projects can be easily replicated through the site's fork process or through a Git clone-push sequence. This is a problem for empirical software engineering, because it can lead to skewed results or mistrained machine learning models. We provide a dataset of 10.6 million GitHub projects that are copies of others, and link each record with the project's ultimate parent. The ultimate parents were derived from a ranking along six metrics. The related projects were calculated as the connected components of an 18.2 million node and 12 million edge denoised graph created by directing edges to ultimate parents. The graph was created by filtering out more than 30 hand-picked and 2.3 million pattern-matched clumping projects. Projects that introduced unwanted clumping were identified by repeatedly visualizing shortest path distances between unrelated important projects. Our dataset identified 30 thousand duplicate projects in an existing popular reference dataset of 1.8 million projects. An evaluation of our dataset against another created independently with different methods found a significant overlap, but also differences attributed to the operational definition of what projects are considered as related.