The PR metric on commit-history.com counts the pull requests a user has opened in public repositories over their entire GitHub lifetime. Opened — not merged, not approved. A PR that gets closed without merging still counted the day it was opened.

What GitHub counts (and doesn't)

Opening a pull request in a public repository: +1, immediately.
Getting it merged: no extra credit — the merge shows up in the author's commit count instead (if it lands on the default branch).
Reviewing someone else's PR: counted separately, under reviews.
PRs in private repositories: folded into the opaque private contributions count.

Reading the number

PR count is the best single indicator of collaboration across repositories. Commits can be accumulated alone in one repo; a pull request implies a proposal made to a codebase — often someone else's. High lifetime PR counts usually belong to:

Open-source regulars who contribute fixes across many projects — each drive-by fix is at least one PR.
PR-workflow engineers whose teams gate every change behind a pull request, even one-line changes. Hundreds of working days × several PRs a day compounds fast.
Stacked-diff practitioners who split every feature into a chain of small PRs — great practice, and it multiplies the count.

The ratio of commits to PRs is a workflow fingerprint. Fifty commits per PR suggests long-running branches or a merge-commit history; one or two commits per PR suggests squash merges or a small-change culture. Neither is better — but comparing raw PR counts between the two is comparing workflows, not people.

What it doesn't measure

Whether the PRs were any good — or even accepted. The metric can't tell a carefully-scoped fix from an automated find-and-replace opened across a hundred repos. As with all contribution counts, volume is legible; judgment isn't.

How commit-history.com tracks it

We accumulate GitHub's monthly pull-request contributions from account creation to today into the cumulative curve, and rank the leaderboard by the lifetime total. Switch any profile's chart to PRs to see when someone's collaboration era actually started — it's often years after their first commit.

See it in action

Look up a profile and flip the metric to PRs, or compare two developers — a kernel maintainer who receives patches by mail and a web-ecosystem author who lives in pull requests make for very different curves.