Complete metadata through Online Search

Feature requests
,
#1

It would be really useful to have the following additional way of filling incomplete metadata, in addition to manual edit and auto-update.

It’d be called something like “update with Online Search”. It would let you issue an online search, reusing the already existing functionality of online search for new articles available under “Add papers”.
You can then select a result from the search and associate it to your existing incomplete record – essentially saying “it’s this one, associate the metadata to my record”.

I think it would be especially useful for those cases resulting from the upload of a PDF you already have in which auto-update fails and little to no metadata are filled automatically. It’d be even more useful on a bulk upload in which metadata cannot be retrieved in a few cases.

What do you think?

#2

Welcome to our forum, @Federico_Rosato, and thanks for the suggestion! Have you experienced the auto-update function not completing metadata, while knowing / having found other relevant sources for the reference in question? My understanding is that auto-update is meant to parse & match all relevant results, checking the same databases as the Search Online feature.

In any case, a complete rewrite of our web app and extension has been in the works for some time now (see our roadmap) and is expected to be released before the end of this year. Among other things, this update will bring improvements for import processes, the metadata edit dialog and allow us to consider / implement new features more effectively.

#3

Hi Vicente! Thank you for your reply.
This happened to me in a few instances. For example:

Shoham, Yoav, Rob Powers, and Trond Grenager. Multi-agent reinforcement learning: a critical survey. Technical report, Stanford University, 2003.

If you look up this reference, you can easiliy find it through the Search Online feature (through Google Scholar). I happened to have beforehand the same PDF file that gets downloaded, but upon upload the metadata could not be associated by auto-update. This is, if you will, a borderline case, since it’s a technical report and not a paper and the origin of the pdf is (i think) the site of GATech, but still it requires manual intervention