The ability to easily upload a PDF (and possibly other formats) manually on Other Sources#314

Currently, the ability to add sources manually is on the “Other Sources” page is somewhat limiting. In order to ingest gray lit, real world evidence, or really anything that’s not a published study, it needs to be a PDF with a URL, and you have to enter a title and an author.

I would like an intuitive way to import PDFs from my computer. While I understand that metadata is usually useful, I also find it annoying that I have to enter metadata like title and author, so it would be great if I could upload the file and just have the name of the file be the only identifying info. That way, I can decide what metadata is important to me.

Lastly, and this is a stretch: I would like to extend this functionality to other forms of media like images, videos, word documents, plain text files, CSVs, etc. This feature would allow me to use the power of NK to conduct all kinds of projects across all kinds of different fields and disciplines, and would enable me to share that research across departments and will all kinds of different clients.

This rings similar to https://nested-knowledge.nolt.io/267 and https://nested-knowledge.nolt.io/190. I think we’ll be best served to focus on upload of a PDF or ZIP archive of PDFs. CERMINE should hopefully make this a straightforward UI, where you just upload a file, and we handle everything else!

The latter request is too squishy for my tastes; realistically, if you cannot invent a title and an author for your data (all that we require), I’m having a hard time imagining it can be useful to you.

That sounds great, as long as uploading the PDF or folder of PDFs (a very useful addition I hadn’t thought of) allows for the arbitrary addition of PDFs. It also might be a time saver to be able to bypass any matching process via CERMINE, depending on whether that process happens quickly or not. For certain types of projects, I might want files in my nest that I know do not correspond to anything in the published clinical literature.

Got it! Yea, maybe if CERMINE fails to find anything useful (which would be likely in the case of anything’s that not a journal article), we could fall back to just using the filename as the title.