Developer social networks (DSNs) are a tool for the analysis of community structures and collaborations between developers in software projects and software ecosystems. Within this paper, we present the results of a systematic mapping study on the use of DSNs in software engineering research. We identified 255 primary studies on DSNs. We mapped the primary studies to research directions, collected information about the data sources and the size of the studies, and conducted a bibliometric assessment. We found that nearly half of the research investigates the structure of developer communities. Other frequent topics are prediction systems build using DSNs, collaboration behavior between developers, and the roles of developers. Moreover, we determined that many publications use a small sample size regarding the number of projects, which could be problematic for the external validity of the research. Our study uncovered several open issues in the state of the art, e.g., studying inter-company collaborations, using multiple information sources for DSN research, as well as general lack of reporting guidelines or replication studies.

中文翻译：

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开发者社交网络研究的系统映射研究

开发者社交网络 (DSN) 是一种用于分析软件项目和软件生态系统中的开发者之间的社区结构和协作的工具。在本文中，我们展示了关于 DSN 在软件工程研究中使用的系统映射研究的结果。我们确定了 255 项关于 DSN 的主要研究。我们将主要研究映射到研究方向，收集有关数据来源和研究规模的信息，并进行文献计量评估。我们发现近一半的研究调查了开发者社区的结构。其他常见主题是使用 DSN 构建的预测系统、开发人员之间的协作行为以及开发人员的角色。此外，我们确定许多出版物在项目数量方面使用小样本，这可能会影响研究的外部有效性。我们的研究揭示了现有技术中的几个开放性问题，例如，研究公司间合作、使用多个信息源进行 DSN 研究，以及普遍缺乏报告指南或复制研究。