An Empirical Survey of GitHub Repositories at U.S. R2 and Doctoral/Professional Universities

Understanding the landscape of Research Software Engineering (RSE) projects, and basic information about RSE repositories such as how many are out there to begin with, is an area of discovery ripe for scholarship. We position this five page short paper, which focuses on US universities with "R2" or "Doctoral/Professional" Carnegie classifications, as a modest intermediary step in a multi-paper arc examining RSE repositories in a variety of research contexts; an arc which has previously examined RSE repositories in the US National Laboratory system and R1 universities.In this work we report to the community our findings on these research questions: What are all the GitHub repositories related to US R2 and Doctoral/Professional universities? Of those, which are RSE projects? Which of these RSE projects have communities larger than just the core authors? How healthy are they? And how do all of the above questions compare to the R1 university context?We find there are both fewer GitHub repositories and fewer RSE repositories at R2 than at R1 institutions, and fewer at doctoral universities than at R2s. Of these fewer RSE projects at R2s and doctoral universities, more of them had a community than RSE projects at R1 universities. While R1 and doctoral universities have similar profiles of healthy/dying/dead repositories, R2 RSE repositories are less likely to be active and more likely to be dead.We also include the number of RSE repositories associated with each R2 and Doctoral/Professional university as a five page appendix.