Applications for mobile phones are certainly convenient. Just the other night, while sitting at a red light as I drove home from work, I ordered a pizza and paid for it before the light changed. I was amazed at the speed and simplicity of it all. Although I already make use of apps that streamline my ability to purchase food, movie tickets, plane tickets, train tickets, and an assortment of silly items from Ebay–I’ve never thought to use my phone for what I spend a vast amount of time doing: academic research. As a graduate student, perusing through journal articles probably consumes as much of my time as sleeping–sometimes researching comes at the price of sleeping! So I thought to myself, why am I not using any apps for research? And what databases, if any, have apps?
I began by searching for EBSCO. Sure enough, EBSCO did have a mobile app. I was happy to see that, through the app, the database could be reached as a guest and anyone searching for key terms could quickly find a multitude of sources and those sources’ abstracts. The search field was quite similar to that found on the actual database’s webpage–except that it didn’t allow me to narrow down any searches by date. But as a supplement to the real deal, the mobile app proved to be a great means of locating sources when away from the computer.
I encourage any researcher to check out the app and see how effective the app is for conducting research while mobile.