---
license: cc-by-4.0
---

## Description

This dataset accompanies the paper *Why Not Fix It Once and for All? An Empirical Study of Multiple Patches for Vulnerability Fixes in Open-Source Software*. It contains 1,581 manually annotated and cleaned records of vulnerabilities fixed by multiple patches.

## Data Structure

MultiPatch is stored in `jsonl` format. Each line corresponds to one CVE and contains the following keys.

```json
{
  "CVE_ID": "the CVE identifier, e.g. CVE-2021-3156, type: str",
  "category": "one or more categories from the list below, type: str",
  "patches": [
    {
      "commit_url": "URL of the fix commit, type: str",
      "diff_code": "the diff code of the patch, type: str",
      "owner": "the owner id of the repository, type: str", 
      "repo_name": "the repository name, type: str", 
      "commit_message": "commit message, type: str"
    }
  ]
}
```

**Category.** A CVE may belong to one or more of the following categories:

- `Fixes for Multiple Locations Across Different Branches or Projects`
- `Incomplete Fixes`
- `Fix and Documentation Updates`
- `Bug-Introducing Fixes`
- `Multi-Location Fixes`
- `Workaround and Formal Fix`

## Citation

```bibtex
@article{qi2026not,
  title={Why Not Fix It Once and for All? An Empirical Study of Multiple Patches for Vulnerability Fixes in Open-Source Software},
  author={Qi, Weiliang and Li, Youpeng and Wang, Xinda},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.13206},
  year={2026}
}
```