Add your first source

In this guide, you will choose one source, add it to an Atlas project, wait for processing, and confirm it is ready to use in chat, citations, and maps.

What you need

• An Atlas project. If you do not have one, read Create and manage projects first.
• One source: a PDF file, a web article URL, a YouTube video URL, or an academic paper title or DOI.

Choose a source that will work well

For your first source, pick something with real content and a text-based format.

Good choices:

• A PDF paper with selectable text
• A public article or report URL
• A YouTube lecture or talk with a transcript
• An academic paper you can find by title, DOI, or arXiv ID

Avoid for your first test:

• A large folder of files
• A scanned PDF without selectable text
• A page behind a login or paywall
• A short page with little content

A clean first source makes it easy to confirm that Atlas is working correctly.

Add the source to your project

Open the project and select the add-source option. Choose the source type that matches what you have:

When in doubt about which type to use, read Source types.

Wait for processing to finish

Adding a source and processing it are separate steps. Atlas needs to process the source before it can power chat, citations, maps, summaries, and search.

The source shows a processing indicator while Atlas works. Do not judge answer quality until that indicator clears. Weak or missing answers during processing usually mean Atlas does not yet have usable text from the source.

Inspect the imported content

Open the source from the project list and check:

• The title matches the source you meant to add.
• Body text, pages, or transcript text is visible.
• The content looks correct rather than truncated or garbled.

For PDFs, search for a phrase from the abstract to confirm text extraction worked. For websites, check that the main article body imported. For YouTube, confirm the transcript text appears.

Ask a verification question

Ask one question that the source should be able to answer:

• What is this source about?
• What are the main claims?
• What methods or evidence does it use?

The answer should name or quote from the source you added. If it does not, check whether the source finished processing before asking more questions.

Check your result

The source is ready when:

• It appears in the project list without a processing indicator.
• The viewer shows readable text.
• Chat can answer a basic question about it with a citation.

Next steps

• Import your next source: Import a PDF into Atlas
• Add a web article: Add a website source
• Search for papers: Search and add academic papers
• Fix a source that did not process: Troubleshoot source processing