It seems that Paperpile can only sometimes update information about a paper using Google Scholar. For instance, for a paper titled “Probabilistic Backward and Forward Reasoning in Stochastic Relational Worlds”, I can easily find the paper in Google Scholar, and paperpile correctly puts a button next to the title indicating that this paper is already in my library. At the same time, in my library, the paper is missing most of the citation information (e.g. the booktitle, date etc.). Still, when running Auto-Update I get: Could not match data online.
Why is Paperpile able to match the publication from within Google Scholar, but not from within Paperpile?
That is a tricky case. Let me first explain why Paperpile recognizes the entry in Google Scholar.
Paperpile calculates for each entry on the Google Scholar page an identifier based on the title and the authors, and matches that against your Paperpile library. So far, so good.
When you attempt and Auto-Update the case is more tricky, since more fields are checked to make sure that we get the correct data. When you import “Probabilistic Backward and Forward Reasoning in Stochastic Relational Worlds” directly from Google Scholar it will be imported as a Conference Paper.
In your case, you state that the book title is missing, which indicates that you have filed this item in your library as a Book Chapter. And this is where Paperpile will reject the match it got from Google Scholar, because from there it retrieves a Conference Paper. Maybe we are a bit overprotective here, but it is better not to do an update than to pull in the wrong information.
Thanks for your reply Andreas.
That was actually not the case. I said booktitle, since that is the name of the bibtex field used for storing the proceedings title. In fact, the paper type was set to “conference paper”, it had authors and title set, but not proceedings title or date. Still, Paperpile could not find it. I can easily reproduce that situation.