GitHub Issue Priority Labels from 5000 Top-Starred Repositories

A manually categorized set of priority-related labels from the 5000 most-starred GitHub repositories as of 2022-06-01. The labels have been ranked and normalized into three values: High, Medium, and Low. The dataset was produced by J. Caddy and C. Treude for a research paper on prioritizing GitHub labels.

Use Cases

• Training classifiers to automatically assign priority labels to new GitHub issues based on the normalized label set.
• Analyzing the prevalence and naming conventions of priority labels across popular open-source projects.
• Building tools that retrieve and display high-priority issues for specific GitHub users, as demonstrated by the included Python script.

Strengths

• Labels are manually categorized and normalized into three priority values, suggesting a curated foundation.
• Source scope is defined as the 5000 most-starred GitHub repositories, providing a specific sampling frame.
• Includes a practical Python script demonstrating a use case for retrieving high-priority issues.

Limitations

• Row count and specific column definitions are unknown, limiting assessment of scale and structure.
• The data is a snapshot from mid-2022 and may not reflect current repository labels or practices.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

GitHub, specifically the 5000 most-starred repositories as of 2022-06-01.

Collection Method

Manually gathered and categorized by the authors.

Time Range

Snapshot as of 2022-06-01.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-22 10:52:14; freshness should be verified.