Frequently Asked Questions
What does the lightbulb on the application icon mean?
The lightbulb on the dock icon means that one or more of your peers published new papers recently. You will find a lightbulb on the cards representing those peers too. By double tapping on a peer, the list of her publications will be shown. New publications are highlighted in a bold font. The lightbulb icon means that some of the new papers have been published within the last two years.
The publications marked as new are not really new publications.
myPeers relies on Google Scholar to fetch the publications of your peers. When Google updates its index, new publications are added even if they were published several years ago. myPeers presents those publications as new. You can consider them "new" as in "newly-discovered by Google".
How can I deal with homonyms?
You can refine the list of publications by specifying one or more research fields just above the publication list. Once you selected the search fields, you can update the list of publications by pressing the update button near the author's picture. If specifying the research fields is not enough, you can uncheck the publications authored by homonyms: the H-index and G-index will update accordingly. myPeers will remember your selections until you change the research fields and update the list of publications manually.
Some of my publications are missing.
myPeers relies on Google Scholar to fetch your publications. If your publications are not listed in Google Scholar there is no way to have them in myPeers. If your publications are listed in Google Scholar and not in myPeers though, the issue could be one of the following:
- You misspelled your name in myPeers.
- In order to reduce the load on Google Scholar, myPeers queries Google Scholar looking for all publications of the given author. Maybe Google did not recognize your name as an author name. You can check if this is the case by typing the following query in Google Scholar: author:"firstname lastname".
- myPeers updates the list of your publications and of your peers regularly. This happens even if you close the myPeers window but not if quit the application completely. If you do not leave the application running with an internet connection available, the list of publications will not be updated. You can force the update by changing your selection of the research fields above the publications list and successively by clicking on the update button near the author's picture.
The list of publications of a peer is empty.
The reason can be one of the following:
- You do not have a working internet connection.
- Your peer's works are not listed in Google Scholar.
- You played way too much with myPeers and Google Scholar banned temporarily your IP address. Check if you have been temporarily banned by surfing to Google Scholar with your web browser, and see if it requires that you solve a captcha to perform a query.
When I double tap on a publication nothing happens.
The publication is not available. Available publications are marked with a small globe.
Do I need to save the changes I have made?
No, all your changes are automatically saved once you quit the application. It is a good policy though to save periodically after changing extensively your peers list. You can save your changes by clicking the Save command in the File menu or by pressing cmd+S.