Help

Having problems? We're compiling a list of things that can go wrong or things that are potentially confusing. We've tried to categorise them as well so you should be able to find an answer to your problem fairly swiftly.

If you can't find anything to help then feel free to drop us an email and we'll try to get in touch. We'll also add your problem and its solution to the list so that future users don't have the same issues.

We've tried to make everything as clear and usable as possible but seeing as how you're reading this we must have made a mistake somewhere. Sorry about that, let's hope we can help. Click a topic below to see an expanded list of issues.

There are lots of versions of a single author's name

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In order to merge author records together you should follow these 5 steps:

1. Browse by author, typing the name in the search box

2. You are likely to find several variants of the name.

3. First, ensure that one is these variants is correct. If not, choose one variant and look at the documents associated with this author (click in the documents column). If these documents are authored by the author you are considering, then go back and click the "Edit" column to correct the name. If these documents were NOT authored by that author, please look at the other variants of the name.

4. Now you have the correct name, but there are other variations of your name that you would like to merge. For each of these variants click on the "Documents" column, and for each document shown click "Edit"

5. Under the Authors section, add a new author and select the correct name. Then delete the incorrect version of the name from the author list and then click "Save".

I get a "There has been an error fingerprinting your pdf" error message

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This error message can be displayed for a variety of reasons but the most common ones are:

Your PDF is too small for us to get a meaningful fingerprint. Our service relies on creating fingerprints of the documents you provide and asking the database to match up these fingerprints. If the document does not contain enough text we cannot get a unique fingerprint from it.

Your PDF contains no text. This can happen if your PDF is actually a picture of text, you can test for this by trying to highlight a sentence; you will be able to if it is not a picture. This gives us the same problem as above however you can try running OCR on the image and creating a new PDF that way.

Your PDF is a combination of the two problems above that results in a PDF with very little text.

I get a "There has been an unexpected error." error message

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There's no good news I'm afraid. Something has gone wrong and we were unable to recover, the only thing we can suggest is that you try turning it off and on again.

If you'd like us to look further into the problem then please email us explaining what you steps you took and what went wrong.

I get a "That file is not a pdf." error message

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This one's easy; the file you've given the application is not a PDF.