"CORE Research Mobile" app lets you view open-access articles on your smartphone

It’s the most wonderful time of the year.  ‘Tis the season for marathon essay-writing, making mountains of flash cards, and mainlining coffee to stay conscious, even though the caffeine only exacerbates your stress-induced head cold.  We’re in the thick of finals, and it’s terrible.  Bring a pillow to the library, because you might not leave until tomorrow…or the next day.  Or ever.  And if you do leave, you might freeze to death walking home.  Thanks, Boston.

Regardless of your major, you’ve probably got too much research to do and not enough backlit screens to do said research efficiently.  Never fear!  Meet CORE Research Mobile, an app that lets you search and download open-access scholarly articles.  You’ll need a reader app to view them on your phone (iBooks is free and works fine), but you won’t have to pay a cent.

Using CRM is not terribly difficult, although it takes a practice run or two to figure out the text-free command buttons.  Simply open the app, type in a simple or advanced search, and voila!  articles by the thousands.

No shortage of search results exists; the more you scroll, the more titles appear.  That being said, they aren’t always relevant.  When I searched “dialectical behavior therapy” , the first article provided mentioned DBT as used in prisons.  Fair enough.  The second? “The Dialectical Relationship between Religion and the Ideology of Science.”  Not helpful.  While many subsequent results are at least tangentially related, little appears in terms of DBT-specific literature.  None of the most prominent publications on the topic appear for download.

Why?  Because CORE (which stands for “COnnecting REpositories” of information) is open-access.  It doesn’t provide abstracts for literature that requires a subscription; every result is available via full text.  On one hand, that’s awesome!  No need to filter through manually.  On the other hand, that means that a lot of literature—including most articles and authors famous in their fields—won’t be available; those pages exist in subscription journals, or on Google, if you’re sneaky.  When using CRM, it’s safe to assume you’re missing the “front line” of information about whatever you’re researching.

On the other hand, because it doesn’t include the standard results of your university library’s multi-database search, CRM can reveal lesser-known, topic-relevant articles, enabling you to cover more ground knowledge-wise.  It can also reveal articles not relating to your topic, which can be fun in its own right.  As I sought articles on eating disorders in sororities, I found a lovely dissertation about the gender politics of roller derby.  I read about 20 pages on my phone (thank God for the zoom feature) before remembering I still have to write a paper of my own, which sadly is not about roller derby—although I might turn it in under the name K Guevara or Punk Rock Princess.

Here’s what I suggest: for primary research, take advantage of your school’s resources first; after all, someone in your family pays for them.  CRM works best as a supplemental search, good if you want to broaden the scope of your lit review or collect ideas for a paper topic.  Besides, you can always bookmark articles for later download and use.  And if you’re wondering what’s out there in cyber-academia, well, CRM is quite fun to play with; plug in some key terms and see what happens.  I searched “kittens” to see what would happen and ended up with an article on “anthropomorphosis of cats among internet users”.

Core Research Mobile is available on iTunes and Droid.  To access CORE without the app, click here.