Shear's publications included works on ancient Greek art and the Acropolis of Athens in addition to her primary field of Mycenaean archaeology.
She published three monographs, including two in which she argued that the Homeric poems (the Iliad and Odyssey) were accurate reflections of the world of Bronze Age Greece.
[11] She published The Panagia Houses of Mycenae in 1987, in which she coined the term "three-room unit" to refer to the basic domestic structure common in Mycenaean archaeology.
Reviewing the work in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Jonathan Burgess considered the argument creative but ultimately unconvincing, partly due to Shear's reliance on then-outdated hypotheses such as Spyridon Marinatos's conjecture that the Bronze Age volcanic eruption of Santorini was reflected in the later story of Atlantis, and partly due to her limited engagement with more recent scholarly approaches to the question of the poems' origins.
[16] Yves Duhoux [de], in L'Antiquité Classique, similarly rejected the argument for ignoring too many discrepancies between the poems and the archaeological record,[17] while James Whitley, in The Classical Review, criticized Shear for misunderstanding previous approaches to the problem (particularly that of Moses Finley) and ignoring more recent ones, particularly that of Anthony Snodgrass;[18] John Bennet called Shear's views "extreme".
[21] A fellowship in her name was established at the ASCSA:[3] as of 2019, this offered graduate students a stipend of $11,500 and accommodation at the school to study Mycenaean or Athenian archaeology.