  Almost every Mining Software Repositories (MSR) study requires, as first
step, the selection of the subject software repositories. These repositories
are usually collected from hosting services like GitHub using specific
selection criteria dictated by the study goal. For example, a study related to
licensing might be interested in selecting projects explicitly declaring a
license. Once the selection criteria have been defined, utilities such as the
GitHub APIs can be used to "query" the hosting service. However, researchers
have to deal with usage limitations imposed by these APIs and a lack of
required information. For example, the GitHub search APIs allow 30 requests per
minute and, when searching repositories, only provide limited information
(e.g., the number of commits in a repository is not included). To support
researchers in sampling projects from GitHub, we present GHS (GitHub Search), a
dataset containing 25 characteristics (e.g., number of commits, license, etc.)
of 735,669 repositories written in 10 programming languages. The set of
characteristics has been derived by looking for frequently used project
selection criteria in MSR studies and the dataset is continuously updated to
(i) always provide fresh data about the existing projects, and (ii) increase
the number of indexed projects. The GHS dataset can be queried through a web
application we built that allows to set many combinations of selection criteria
needed for a study and download the information of matching repositories:
https://seart-ghs.si.usi.ch.
