A tool with a repository and packages

The common case for research software: a GitHub repository, one or more package registries, and (usually) a paper describing it. Giving boast all three means every Category — Code, Downloads, Citations, Attention — has something to report on.

boast about --repo samtools/samtools \
            --package conda:bioconda/samtools \
            10.1093/gigascience/giab008

--package is repeatable — list every registry the tool is published on. samtools is also on Homebrew, so:

boast about --repo samtools/samtools \
            --package conda:bioconda/samtools \
            --package homebrew:samtools \
            10.1093/gigascience/giab008

Count scholarly mentions for a repository

You can query a repository on its own:

boast about --repo mbhall88/rasusa

--repo accepts either owner/name or a full GitHub URL. The repository identity is normalised before querying, and boast searches the quoted host-qualified phrase github.com/owner/name in both OpenAlex and Europe PMC. It does not add a bare owner/name alias, because punctuation-aware matching cannot make that search literal.

The relevant part of the report looks like this:

━━ github:mbhall88/rasusa ━━
── Attention ──
  mentions  16  all-time  openalex
  mentions  12  all-time  europe_pmc

These values are indexed full-text search estimates, not formal citation counts or verified literal URL occurrences. Coverage is partial; Europe PMC is concentrated in life-sciences literature; self-mentions count; and article/preprint versions may be counted separately. The providers are independent and their values are never summed.

Output (Code, indexed scholarly mentions under Attention, Downloads per channel, and a Downloads Rollup — Citations are the same shape shown in Getting started, so only the sections that are new here are shown):

━━ github:samtools/samtools ━━
── Code ──
  stars                 1934  all-time  github
  forks                  613  all-time  github
  watchers                94  all-time  github  users watching the repo (subscribers)
  repo_age_years       14.40  all-time  github  since 2012-03-09
  contributors            108  all-time  github
  release_downloads  2156386  all-time  github  summed across release assets

── Attention ──
  mentions                 407  all-time  openalex
  mentions                1104  all-time  europe_pmc

━━ conda:bioconda/samtools ━━
── Downloads ──
  downloads  9032484  all-time  bioconda

━━ homebrew:samtools ━━
── Downloads ──
  downloads_30d    503  last 30 days   homebrew
  downloads_90d   1169  last 90 days   homebrew
  downloads_365d  5566  last 365 days  homebrew

═══ Downloads Rollup (derived — see channels above) ═══
  11188870 all-time = github:samtools/samtools (2156386) + conda:bioconda/samtools (9032484)

The Attention section reports independent indexed-search estimates from OpenAlex and Europe PMC for the repository’s host-qualified URL. They are shown side by side and are not summed: each service has different coverage, and the counts can include self-mentions and separate article/preprint versions. The Notice attached to each row explains those limits.

Homebrew’s own Metrics don’t join the Rollup — they’re all trailing Windows (30/90/365 day), and a Rollup can only sum Metrics that share a compatible Window (see Concepts, Rollup and Window); mixing a trailing count in with two all-time counts would misrepresent the total, so it stays out.

Run boast providers to see the full registry of Providers, which Category each serves, and which package registries they cover.

Container images

Many research tools also ship as a container, on two registries boast covers:

• Docker Hub, as docker:namespace/name. Official images live under library, so ubuntu is docker:library/ubuntu.
• Quay.io, as quay:namespace/name. This is where Bioconda’s auto-built per-package containers live, so a bioconda recipe gets you quay:biocontainers/<pkg> for free.

If you package for Bioconda, reach for Quay. The biocontainers/ organisation on Docker Hub is an older, hand-curated set — its samtools image was last pushed in 2019 — while quay.io/biocontainers is what the build system actually publishes to, and where the traffic actually goes:

boast about --package quay:biocontainers/samtools \
            --package docker:biocontainers/samtools \
            --package conda:bioconda/samtools

Captured on a later day than the run above, so bioconda’s count has moved on — which is the point of Snapshots being dated:

━━ quay:biocontainers/samtools ━━
── Downloads ──
  pulls  1786502  last 92 days  quay

━━ docker:biocontainers/samtools ━━
── Downloads ──
  downloads  596337  all-time  dockerhub

━━ conda:bioconda/samtools ━━
── Downloads ──
  downloads  9055038  all-time  bioconda

═══ Downloads Rollup (derived — see channels above) ═══
  9651375 all-time = docker:biocontainers/samtools (596337) + conda:bioconda/samtools (9055038)

── Notices ──
  Quay.io pull counts record image fetches by machines, not installs by people, and CI re-pulls dominate for a biocontainer; Quay publishes only a rolling daily series, so this is not an all-time total
  Docker Hub pull counts record image fetches by machines, not installs by people: CI re-pulls and mirror warming inflate the figure, and it never resets

Note the scale: three months on Quay is triple the lifetime total of the stale Docker Hub image.

The two registries land in the Rollup differently, and it’s the Window that decides — not the fact that both count container pulls:

• Docker Hub publishes an all-time pull_count, so it shares a cumulative Window with the conda and crates.io counts and joins the Rollup.
• Quay publishes only a rolling daily series, never a lifetime total, so its figure is trailing. boast reports the window it actually measured — last 92 days above, read off the length of the series Quay returned rather than assumed — and a trailing count can’t be summed with all-time ones, so it stays out of the all-time Rollup.

To be precise about the rule: what’s excluded is mixing incompatible Windows, not trailing Windows as such. Metrics sharing an exactly-equal trailing Window do roll up together — a Homebrew 30-day install count and a PyPI 30-day download count form their own last 30 days Rollup, separate from the all-time one. Quay’s ~92-day window simply has nothing else to pair with today.

Read every container number with its Notice in mind: a pull is a much weaker signal than an install. Both registries count image fetches by machines, so CI re-runs and mirror warming land in the same figure, and Docker Hub’s counter never resets — docker:library/ubuntu sits near ten billion. This is why the Rollup always names each channel and its own value: the total is only ever as meaningful as the channels you can see underneath it.

One quirk worth knowing about Quay: it answers a lookup for an image you can’t see with “requires authentication” rather than “not found”, and it does that identically whether the image is private or simply doesn’t exist. boast reports that as N/A with a note saying so, not as a failed fetch — no amount of retrying will turn it into a number, so it doesn’t make your Snapshot partial.

GitHub’s container registry (ghcr.io) has no equivalent Provider, because GHCR publishes no pull statistics — neither the OCI registry API nor GitHub’s Packages API exposes a download count. An image hosted only there can’t contribute to Downloads at all.

Save the identifiers for next time

Re-typing --repo/--package/the DOI on every run gets old fast. --save writes a Manifest capturing exactly the identities (and --topic, if given) used in this run:

boast about --repo samtools/samtools \
            --package conda:bioconda/samtools \
            --save manifest.toml \
            10.1093/gigascience/giab008

From then on:

boast about manifest.toml

You can also build a Manifest up front, without fetching anything, via boast init (same flags as about):

boast init --repo samtools/samtools --package conda:bioconda/samtools \
           --package homebrew:samtools -o manifest.toml 10.1093/gigascience/giab008

manifest.toml now contains, offline, with nothing fetched:

[[project]]
identities = [
    "doi:10.1093/gigascience/giab008",
    "github:samtools/samtools",
    "conda:bioconda/samtools",
    "homebrew:samtools",
]

Ranking within a cohort

If the repo is tagged with a GitHub topic (or you want to force one), boast can report where it ranks by stars among every repo sharing that topic:

boast about --repo samtools/samtools --topic bioinformatics 10.1093/gigascience/giab008

The Code section gains a cohort_rank row, and a matching disclaimer appears in Notices:

── Code ──
  ...
  cohort_rank (bioinformatics)       16  all-time  github

── Notices ──
  #16 of 15275 repos tagged 'bioinformatics'; GitHub topics are inconsistently applied

Omit --topic and boast ranks within whatever topics the repo has actually declared on GitHub — see the Cohort entry in Concepts for the disclaimer this ranking always carries.