Harmony tends to perform better if you upload a file with item numbers.
If there are are no question numbers in the instrument, it’s very hard for Harmony to distinguish question text from other content such as the copyright information. Click here to see an example PDF with question numbers included.
Also, if your PDF is a scanned document, please see if you can find a fully digitised (OCR’ed) version of the document.
We suggest either finding a file with question numbers or better quality content. Or try a different file format such as Word, Excel or CSV. We have guidance on formatting your files for Harmony.
Harmony supports:
Finally, feel free to raise an issue to let us know that your PDF isn’t being parsed. Please also share the PDF in question. Harmony is an open source tool for social sciences research.
[Beta mode: we are currently testing this extension] We have developed a browser extension for Harmony called “Send to Harmony” which lets you send selected text to Harmony with a right-click. For PDFs, use the popup to paste your selected text. Send to Harmony enables users to send selected text to the Harmony Data Harmonization (https://harmonydata.ac.uk/) platform for analysis. This plugin provides a right-click or context menu item which allows users to easily bring text from into their harmonisations, making it easier to compare and analyze different measurement scales across research studies.
We have a number of exciting updates to Harmony including: some improvements to the R library which have been asked for by researchers around the world who have been using Harmony on studies in lots of different topics as well as making our own fine tuned large language model available in the web UI, which is José’s winning model from the DOXA challenge which ended on 10 January 2025. Harmony has its own Large Language Model!
