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I just received an email from Peerus "letting me know" that my paper was published. While it sells itself as a paper monitoring app, better than google scholar, it does seem to be closer to academia.edu.

I do find deceptive in their email the large orange button with Find your papers on peerus followed in small by by clicking you accept our TCU.

Also I don't understand how they want to monetize their product. The website claims to be free (for researchers) but does not give any additional information.

So does someone has experience with their service? How do they compare with google scholar / academia.edu (which seems to have a bad rep as seen in this question Is Academia.edu useful?)?

Zenon
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    I suspect that you already knew your paper was published. So, you have received worthless information from some random website that wants you to sign up for who knows what other (likely mostly useless) information. What to do, what to do... Hmmmm... I vote for directing similar emails to the spam folder myself. – Jon Custer Mar 19 '18 at 13:28
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    @JonCuster I agree with most of what you say. I couldn’t find independent comments online so this could be useful for people looking about it. – Zenon Mar 19 '18 at 14:11
  • I have voted to close this as "shopping" since it veers into the area of assessing specific organizations, which we generally want to stay away from on this site. – jakebeal Mar 19 '18 at 18:55
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    With a quick search (academia.edu, ResearchGate, LinkedIn, ...), "shopping questions" seem to be on-topic in this site. – Orion Mar 19 '18 at 20:31
  • @jakebeal this is in the spirit of the Is Academia.edu useful question, which is protected with over 45 upvotes. I believe that academic related “services” are, due to there smaller target pool, under represented in online reviews. This site can help clarify the quality of their services, at least between predatory with bad marketing tactics (as academia.edu which for examples scraps Facebook profiles and emails as someone else) and more legit ones (which usefulness is left to determine by the users). – Zenon Mar 20 '18 at 02:28
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    @Zenon This is in a grey area, there has long been a standing consensus that in general this site should stay away from evaluating individual organizations, since that is often a matter of perspective. For a small number of sites, however, exceptions are occasionally made because they are so massive and prevalent. Peerus doesn't seem to me to meet that threshold yet, as it doesn't even have a wikipedia article yet or make it off the first couple pages of Google results. – jakebeal Mar 20 '18 at 02:39
  • @jakebeal that’s fair, is there a meta-discussion about it? I was surprised by Peerus “credentials”, lots of CNRS people seem to be participating in its development. I’ll wait now to see what the community decides. Thanks ! – Zenon Mar 20 '18 at 02:49
  • @Zenon A relevant discussion from meta: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2038/defining-shopping-questions – jakebeal Mar 20 '18 at 02:54
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    I opened a more specific discussion on Meta regarding such questions. Please take the discussion there. (CC @jakebeal.) – Wrzlprmft Mar 21 '18 at 20:04

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I've been using Peerus for a few months and I can actually say it's been resourceful. I use it for monitoring very specific topics and one journal (specifically, papers about coral diseases and coral immunology, and the journal Diseases of aquatic organisms) and by checking it once every few weeks, I usually find some very interesting results.

Lumimoto
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