FLOSSmole as a catalyst for research

One of the papers at the 2011 OSS conference is entitled "Building Knowledge in Open Source Software Research in Six Years of Conferences". It surveys the contributions of papers presented at the OSS conferences, and builds social networks of the papers, identifying research streams along the way.

Findings particular to FLOSSmole:

"Cluster #82. The largest cluster originates from node #82. Paper #82 introduces the OSSmole project (later called FLOSSmole). OSSmole is a repository of data, scripts, and analysis of data collected from OSS projects."

and

"Large clusters are initiated by empirical papers with the only exception being the paper on the FLOSSmole repository."

and

"Papers with a large number of citations [ed: such as FLOSSmole paper] are synthesizers of research often presenting a framework or a platform to guide research in OSS."

and

"In particular, we have found that the creation of a big repository for data mining (FLOSSmole) has originated research in social network analysis, tools for data mining, and analysis of code artefacts to understand maintenance processes, specifically bug fixing."