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The ethics issues raised by such research therefore need to be considered before beginning. This paper presents a discussion of ethics issues that can arise in MSR research, using the mining challenges from the years 2006 to 2021 as a case study to identify the kinds of data used. On the basis of contemporary research ethics frameworks we discuss ethics challenges that may be encountered in creating and using repositories and associated datasets. We also report some results from a small community survey of approaches to ethics in MSR research. In addition, we present four case studies illustrating typical ethics issues one encounters in projects and how ethics considerations can shape projects before they commence. Based on our experience, we present some guidelines and practices that can help in considering potential ethics issues and reducing risks.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1007\/s10664-021-10057-7","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,11,2]],"date-time":"2021-11-02T03:02:27Z","timestamp":1635822147000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":25,"title":["Ethics in the mining of software repositories"],"prefix":"10.1007","volume":"27","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2195-5995","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Nicolas E.","family":"Gold","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1009-2861","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jens","family":"Krinke","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,11,2]]},"reference":[{"key":"10057_CR1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","unstructured":"Abric D, Clark O E, Caminiti M, Gallaba K, Mcintosh S (2019) Can duplicate questions on Stack Overflow benefit the software development community?. 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In accordance with institutional policy as it applied at the relevant time, approvals were obtained as follows: Case Study 2 (Section\u00a0) was approved by the UCL Research Ethics Committee (6082\/002) and the survey reported in Section\u00a0 was approved by the Head of Department of Computer Science, UCL. All other research presented in this work did not require approval, but was performed following advice from the appropriate sources at UCL at the relevant time.","order":1,"name":"Ethics","group":{"name":"EthicsHeading","label":"Declarations"}},{"value":"See Section\u00a0 for detailed discussion of the ethics considerations for the work presented in the paper.","order":2,"name":"Ethics","group":{"name":"EthicsHeading","label":"Declarations"}}],"article-number":"17"}}