Attracting and retaining a steady stream of new contributors is crucial to ensuring the long-term survival of open-source software (OSS) projects. However, there are two key research gaps regarding recommendations for onboarding new contributors to OSS projects. First, most of the existing recommendations are based on a limited number of projects, which raises concerns about their generalizability. If a recommendation yields conflicting results in a different context, it could hinder a newcomer's onboarding process rather than help them. Second, it's unclear whether these recommendations also apply to experienced contributors. If certain recommendations are specific to newcomers, continuing to follow them after their initial contributions are accepted could hinder their chances of becoming long-term contributors. To address these gaps, we conducted a two-stage mixed-method study. In the first stage, we conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and identified 15 task-related actionable recommendations that newcomers to OSS projects can follow to improve their odds of successful onboarding. In the second stage, we conduct a large-scale empirical study of five Gerrit-based projects and 1,155 OSS projects from GitHub to assess whether those recommendations assist newcomers' successful onboarding. Our results suggest that four recommendations positively correlate with newcomers' first patch acceptance in most contexts. Four recommendations are context-dependent, and four indicate significant negative associations for most projects. Our results also found three newcomer-specific recommendations, which OSS joiners should abandon at non-newcomer status to increase their odds of becoming long-term contributors.

翻译：吸引并持续留住新贡献者对于确保开源软件（OSS）项目的长期生存至关重要。然而，关于开源项目新成员入门推荐方案的研究存在两个关键缺口。首先，现有推荐大多基于有限数量的项目，其普适性存在疑虑。若某项推荐在不同情境下产生矛盾结果，反而可能阻碍而非帮助新成员的入门过程。其次，这些推荐是否同样适用于经验丰富的贡献者尚不明确。若某些推荐仅针对新成员，在其初始贡献被接受后继续遵循这些建议，反而可能阻碍其成为长期贡献者。为填补这些研究空白，我们开展了一项两阶段混合方法研究。在第一阶段，我们通过系统性文献综述（SLR）识别出15项与任务相关的可操作性建议，开源项目新成员可遵循这些建议以提高成功入门概率。在第二阶段，我们对5个基于Gerrit的项目及来自GitHub的1,155个开源项目展开大规模实证研究，以评估这些建议是否真正有助于新成员成功入门。研究结果表明：四项建议在多数情境下与新成员首补丁接受率呈正相关；四项建议具有情境依赖性；另有四项建议在多数项目中呈现显著负相关。我们还发现三项专属于新成员的建议，开源参与者在脱离新成员身份后应停止遵循这些建议，以提升成为长期贡献者的概率。