A First Look at the Deprecation of RESTful APIs: An Empirical Study
https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.12808
Method
"we conduct an empirical study to investigate how the deprecated-removed protocol is followed in RESTful APIs and characterize deprecation practices in RESTful APIs"
Population
"2,224 versions of APIs from 1,368 RESTful APIs listed on APIs.guru"
What it does not show
Characterises provider-side signalling from static specifications only. It does not observe client behaviour, runtime traffic or whether anyone migrated, and the directory it draws from skews toward larger, better-documented public APIs.
Jerin Yasmin, Yuan Tian, Jinqiu Yang
Of 251 API versions that introduced a breaking change, 87.3% deprecated nothing in the previous version. Among the 219 APIs with any deprecation content, only 45% supplied replacements for every affected operation, and just 3 used a proactive channel — informing callers at call time via headers or error codes rather than relying on documentation.
Tier II: Large-N observational analysis of publicly hosted API specifications using an automated detector. No control group.