  Millions of developers share their code on open-source platforms like GitHub,
which offer social coding opportunities such as distributed collaboration and
popularity-based ranking. Software engineering researchers have joined in as
well, hosting their research artifacts (tools, replication package & datasets)
in repositories, an action often marked as part of the publications
contribution. Yet a decade after the first such paper-with-GitHub-link, little
is known about the fate of such repositories in practice. Do research
repositories ever gain the interest of the developer community, or other
researchers? If so, how often and why (not)? Does effort invested on GitHub pay
off with research impact? In short: we ask whether and how authors engage in
social coding related to their research. We conduct a broad empirical
investigation of repositories from published work, starting with ten thousand
papers in top SE research venues, hand-annotating their 3449 GitHub (and
Zenodo) links, and studying 309 paper-related repositories in detail. We find a
wide distribution in popularity and impact, some strongly correlated with
publication venue. These were often heavily informed by the authors investment
in terms of timely responsiveness and upkeep, which was often remarkably subpar
by GitHubs standards, if not absent altogether. Yet we also offer hope: popular
repositories often go hand-in-hand with well-citepd papers and achieve broad
impact. Our findings suggest the need to rethink the research incentives and
reward structure around research products requiring such sustained
contributions.
