jackwener/OpenCLI · warning · EmptyResultError

No papers found for author "${authorText}". Try alternate sp

Error message

No papers found for author "${authorText}". Try alternate spellings (e.g. initials).

What it means

An EmptyResultError thrown when the arXiv author search API returns zero entries for the given author query. The search uses a quoted phrase query au:"<name>" sorted by submission date descending, so exact phrase matching means alternate spellings, initials, or diacritics can yield no hits. This is an expected empty outcome, not a fault.

Source

Thrown at clis/arxiv/author.js:33

    strategy: Strategy.PUBLIC,
    browser: false,
    args: [
        { name: 'author', positional: true, required: true, help: 'Author name (e.g. "Yoshua Bengio" or "Y Bengio")' },
        { name: 'limit', type: 'int', default: 20, help: 'Max papers to return (max 50)' },
    ],
    columns: ['id', 'title', 'authors', 'published', 'primary_category', 'url'],
    func: async (args) => {
        const authorText = String(args.author || '').trim();
        if (!authorText) {
            throw new ArgumentError('arxiv author cannot be empty', 'Example: opencli arxiv author "Yoshua Bengio"');
        }
        const limit = normalizeArxivLimit(args.limit, 20, 50);
        // Quote the value so multi-word author names match as a phrase.
        const query = encodeURIComponent(`au:"${authorText}"`);
        const xml = await arxivFetch(`search_query=${query}&max_results=${limit}&sortBy=submittedDate&sortOrder=descending`);
        const entries = parseEntries(xml);
        if (!entries.length) {
            throw new EmptyResultError('arxiv author', `No papers found for author "${authorText}". Try alternate spellings (e.g. initials).`);
        }
        return entries.map(e => ({
            id: e.id,
            title: e.title,
            authors: e.authors,
            published: e.published,
            primary_category: e.primary_category,
            url: e.url,
        }));
    },
});

View on GitHub (pinned to 49907e53dc)

Solutions

1. Try alternate spellings and initials: "Y Bengio", "Yoshua Bengio", "Bengio Y"
2. Drop diacritics or try the ASCII form of the name
3. Verify the author actually has arXiv papers (search arxiv.org manually)
4. Broaden to a keyword search via `opencli arxiv search <name>` to see if any entries exist

Example fix

// before
await exec('opencli arxiv author ' + name);
// after
try {
  return await exec(`opencli arxiv author "${name}"`);
} catch (e) {
  if (e.name === 'EmptyResultError') {
    const initials = name.split(/\s+/).map((w, i) => i < w.length - 1 ? w[0] : w).join(' ');
    return await exec(`opencli arxiv author "${initials}"`); // retry with initials
  }
  throw e;
}

const author = String(name || '').trim();
if (!author) throw new Error('author required');

null

try {
  return await exec(`opencli arxiv author "${author}"`);
} catch (e) {
  if (e.name === 'EmptyResultError') {
    // fallback: broaden to keyword search
    return await exec(`opencli arxiv search "${author}"`);
  }
  throw e;
}

When it happens

Trigger: `opencli arxiv author "<name>"` where parseEntries(xml) returns [] — the au: phrase query matched no arXiv papers, e.g. misspelled name, name-only vs initials mismatch, or arXiv indexing differences.

Common situations: Searching "Yoshua Bengio" with a typo; authors who publish under initials ("Y. Bengio"); names with unicode diacritics stored differently in arXiv metadata; very new authors with no submissions.

Understand the failure class

Background: EmptyResultError / "no results found": when an API or scraper succeeds but returns zero rows — this error's family across 9 libraries.

Related errors

• No papers found. Try a different keyword.
• No 12306 stations match "${keyword}"
• ${label}
• Paper ${args.id} was not found. Check the arXiv ID format, e
• No recent papers in ${category}. Check the category name.

AI-assisted analysis of jackwener/OpenCLI@49907e53dc (2026-08-29). Data as JSON: /api/errors/3881de072ec9b9c5. Report an issue: GitHub.