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Apps for Research & Writing: Research Articles

A guide containing recommended apps for research, ebook reading, and document storage, sharing, annotating and citing.

EBSCOHost App

EbscoHost is our largest database collection and it has provided an app to facilitate researching on a mobile device.

The EBSCO App is available for iOS and Android devices from the iTunes App store and Google Play.

After opening the EBSCO App, use the Find my Library feature to sign in with your MCLA login.

If you have previously created a Personal User Account for accessing EBSCOhost/EBSCO Discovery Service, you can use that to log in to the app. When you log into the app with your personal user credentials, any articles you save in the app are automatically saved to your personal folder.

You only need to log in to the app once. The app remembers your login credentials and you are automatically authenticated for future sessions.

Note: If you log in with your MCLA login, you can create your own Personal User Account from within the app.

To log in to the EBSCO Mobile App:

  1. Open the App and tap Get Started.

  2. Tap the search box to find your library or tap Use my location to find MCLA or put North Adams in the search box.

  3. Select MCLA from the list and click Next.

  4. Tap Continue to allow the app to continue to sign you in.

  5. Log in with your MCLA login

    -OR-

    If you have already created a personal user account, you can sign in with your personal account credentials.

Gale App

Gale is also a multi-database provider for the MCLA Library. They also have an app but it isn't as good as the EBSCOHost app.

Setting Up the App

  1. Go to this page and either download Access My Library at the App Store or from Google Play.
  2. After you install the app and open it, you need to find your institution. Choose "Find/Add Libraries"
  3. Choose "College Libraries" and then choose "Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts."
  4. TIt will promt you for a password. Choose "Retrieve Password" and enter your MCLA email address. It has to be your MCLA one in order to authenticate.
  5. The password will be sent to you via email.
  6. You will then have access to MCLA's Gale databases.

Using the App

  1. You can search all the Gale databases at once using the searchbox under "Search Our Resources"
  2. You can choose a particular database by clicking on the databases icon at the bottom of the screen.
  3. Articles and clippings can be saved in the app for future access or you can download an article to OneDrive or Google Drive.

The Gale app isn't as fancy as the EBSCOHost app. Once you do a search it looks like their website, it isn't very customized. The back button can be found at the bottom of the screen, not the top. I recommend you email the article to yourself as a PDF attachment and from your email save the document to GoodReader or another app.

For articles that are not available full-text look for the words "Library Links." This will look in other databases for that article or offer you the interlibrary loan request screen.

More Mobile sites and apps