Publish or Perish version 5

Introduces Publish or Perish release 5 and gives a historic overview of its development

David Adams - Fri 28 Oct 2016 10:50 (updated Thu 2 Jun 2022 17:41)

Update: We released the next version, Publish or Perish version 6, in November 2017, Publish or Perish version 7 in September 2019, and Publish or Perish version 8 in November 2021.

The first lines of code for the Publish or Perish software were written in October 2006. Today, 10 years later to the month, Publish or Perish has been in widespread use all over the world for almost as long as its development history and we are proud to introduce its latest incarnation, prosaically called Version 5 or PoP5.

What's new

Publish or Perish version 5 (PoP5) is probably the most extensive revision of the software in its 10 year history. We have reviewed, revised, and (hopefully) improved almost every area of the program. Some highlights:

• Completely redesigned user interface - the most obvious change. The new PoP5 interface has only a single view that covers all aspects of its operation instead of having separate Author, Journal, and General search pages, plus an additional Multi-query center as previous versions had. In the new version, all of the information and all of the functionality are available all of the time. The new interface also scales nicely to high-DPI screens; great for people with fancy Retina, 4K, or even 5K displays.
• New and better support for data sources - in addition to the original Google Scholar database, PoP5 now also accesses Google Citations Profile in a natural manner (just type the name and optionally the affiliation of the person you are looking for) and Microsoft Academic Search. You can also import data from ISI/Web of Science, Scopus, EndNote, RefManager, and various other external sources.
• Improved query syntax - in most cases, you no longer need to quote "author names" and other phrases; PoP5 will automatically infer the intended grouping. For example, instead of "a harzing" AND "m pudelko" simply type a harzing AND m pudelko; to search for your own name, just type its initials and surname like so: d p blunderbus.
• Major internal cleanup - less obviously, but equally important is that we went through all of the source code with a fine toothcomb and refactored, pruned, and generally cleaned up code that had grown piecemeal over 10 years. It should now be ready for a good few more years of development.

A bit of history

To be honest: we have lost count of the number of Publish or Perish releases that there have been. Over its ten years of development the Publish or Perish source code moved from its original source code control system to a new one, we moved half a world, and the computing world changed from being predominantly Personal Computer based to an Internet of Things.

A conservative guess is that there have been almost 200 public Publish or Perish releases, plus many more as internal or test releases. Today's internal Subversion revision number (since 2009) is 5492; add to that another three years of intensive development under the previous source code control system and we're probably looking at ~10,000 individual "commit" actions, each with anywhere between 1 and 1000 changes to the source code.

And it all started as a quick hack because Anne-Wil needed to calculate her h-index and I thought that it would be easier to write a small program for that...

So, for what it's worth, here is a coarse timeline:

Support Publish or Perish

While the development of the Publish or Perish software is a volunteering effort and download and use of Publish or Perish is and will remain free (gratis), your support toward the costs of hosting, bandwidth, and software development are appreciated. Your support helps further development of Publish or Perish for new data sources and additional features.

Please do not feel obliged to support us financially; we developed Publish or Perish to help academics across the world obtain better (and free) access to academic data sources and will remain to do so.

Everyone can access the free online help resources for the program and you can support us simply by sending us an email explaining why the software is useful to you.

Note: all prices are in Pounds Sterling (GBP). VAT does not apply.