  We present a novel approach to detect refactoring opportunities by measuring
the participation of references between types in instances of patterns
representing design flaws. This technique is validated using an experiment
where we analyse a set of 95 open-source Java programs for instances of four
patterns representing modularisation problems. It turns out that our algorithm
can detect high impact refactorings opportunities - a small number of
references such that the removal of those references removes the majority of
patterns from the program.
