Gotta love Twitter for finding useful and helpful things that make a difference to scientific research… Last night I saw a tweet from the delightful Tara Yates of AACR:

Tara G Yates, AACR

Yes please!

Whether you are a subscriber or interested in the offer like I was, you can download the AACR app on iTunes.

I couldn’t resist – did it immediately on my iPad and discovered the AACR app was beautiful – well designed UI, nicely integrated and intuitive features, easy to use. The sharp interface looks like this:

AACR iPad App

You can scroll through, choose a journal, read Online first, Current Issue or the previous three issues. Very neat. You can also favourite articles for later reading:

AACR iPhone App Abstract

Note the “Download the PDF” button at the top right. This is where the app really shines. In the iPad, you can download the PDF and save it to any readers you have such as iBooks, Goodreads, Stanza or whatever you have installed. The app let’s you choose your preferred option. I like iBooks and save PDFs to there for easy reading while travelling or even while working or writing blog posts.

The other option I use is to save PDFs to Evernote as well. The reason for this is that the readers all search on title alone, whereas Evernote is OCR based and will find words in an article, not just the title. This is very handy if you need to find something quickly and only have a vague idea of what you remember.  The other day I needed an article on VEGF biomarkers but only remembered vaguely reading it was about ‘myeloid’ factors and couldn’t remember the journal, authors, the institution, the drug or anything else other than VEGF and myeloid.  Evernote found it in seconds after searching for ‘myeloid’. Very cool.

Evernote also syncs seamlessly across my iPad, iPhone, laptop and Desktop computers making it the ultimate database and search tool for scientific data and papers.  It has certainly saved my bacon more than a few times when doing consulting projects!

I highly recommend this app from AACR – even if you’re not a member, it’s well worth checking out the free access offer and reading a lot of high quality articles on a range of topics from basic and translational research, to biomarkers, clinical research and even cancer prevention.  It’s really very easy to get engrossed reading the interesting journal articles on a iPad and forgetting to download or save them…  I’m going to be very sad when the free trial runs out next month 🙁

Nice job, AACR!

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