一句话：通过大规模准实验量化核心贡献者退出对 GitHub 项目 PR 吞吐、接受率与合并时间的影响。
论文关注开源项目中核心贡献者退出对贡献工作流的影响。作者分析 50,804 个 GitHub 仓库中超过 3500 万个 PR，识别出 95,958 次退出爆发（同一周内一名或多名核心贡献者超过 365 天不活跃），涉及 174,887 名贡献者。研究采用匹配控制组的双重差分（Difference-in-Differences）方法，考察 PR 吞吐量、接受率和合并时间。结果发现影响因贡献者与项目特征而异：提交占比高的贡献者退出会显著降低吞吐量和接受率；长期任职者的退出对这些指标影响较温和，但会增加合并时间，表明项目隐性知识流失。研究为核心贡献者退出如何影响 OSS 工作流提供实证证据，并揭示项目韧性的结构性因素。
The sustainability of Open Source Software (OSS) projects often depends on a small group of core contributors. When these contributors disengage, projects may face disruption; however, the consequences of such disengagement on OSS contribution workflows remain underexplored. This paper presents a large-scale quasi-experimental study quantifying the impact of core contributor disengagement on pull request (PR) throughput, acceptance rate, and time to merge. We analyzed over 35 million PRs across 50,804 GitHub repositories, identifying 95,958 disengagement bursts (one or more core contributors becoming inactive for > 365 days within the same week) involving 174,887 contributors. Using Difference-in-Differences with matched control groups, we found that the impact varies substantially with contributor and project characteristics. Disengagements of contributors with a high share of commits lead to pronounced declines in throughput and acceptance, while long-tenured contributors’ disengagements have milder effects on those metrics but increase merge time, suggesting loss of tacit project knowledge. These findings provide empirical evidence of how core contributors’ disengagement influences OSS workflows and highlight structural factors associated with project resilience.
@inproceedings{paperbot11911,
title = {How Does Core Contributor Disengagement Impact Open Source Project Activity? A Quasi-Experiment},
author = {Yunqi Chen and Klaas-Jan Stol and Fabio Santos and Daniel M German and Bianca Trinkenreich},
booktitle = {ICSE},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1145/3744916.3773135}
}