App Review: Read by QxMD

Bottom Line: Read is an easy to use app that can help busy academicians deal with information overload by bringing you personalized and customizable curation of journal articles. If your institution supports full-text PDF access, Read offers a portable tool to keep up with the primary literature.  

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ - Very Useful

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It is difficult to stay on top of the ever-expanding medical literature. How many of the 750,000 articles from over 5,647 MEDLINE journals that PubMed indexed in 2014 did you read? How do you even know where to start? Can technology help us become more efficient in dealing with information overload? How can a busy academic educator keep up with the primary literature in the most efficient way?

Read is a free app for both iOS and Android that offers quick and portable access to the literature in an intuitive interface. I’ve got to admit, I love this app and use it regularly to stay abreast of updates in my niche area. It is like having an army of personal assistants comb through thousands of journal articles every day to pick out the ones that are relevant to me. And it is free! It is the best deal since the Subway $6 Footlong of the Day.

After downloading the app, you can create an account that links to your institution. You can then start customizing your journal reading experience to bring relevant articles directly to your mobile device. 
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When you open the app, the front page allows you to scroll through featured articles. The app curates a collection of articles that is “personalized” and chosen by the app, based on the journals you follow. The title, journal, date, and brief snippet are highlighted for quick browsing. Many of the articles they feature are interesting and relevant, but there is still work to do on really personalizing the content. I love the ketamine paper, but do I really care about outpatient management of gestational diabetes? Probably not.     

Main Page

Main Menu

The personalized main-menu gives access to journals you follow, saved collections of favorite articles, saved keywords, recent articles you’ve accessed, and the in-app search function. 

​The “My Followed Journals” section lets you keep up with the journals you’re interested in. When new content is published in those journals, a small red icon shows how many new articles you haven’t read. It can be daunting, and, as you can see, I am a bit behind. While helpful, I don’t think the main value of the app is in this feature. 

"My Followed Journals" Page

"My Followed Connections" Page

Read also allows you to follow the curated collections of other Read users under the “My Followed Collections” tab. For example, one could follow papers about “FOAMed” curated by David Hedman. There are many collections available with offers another way to crowdsource important papers within your specialty.

​Where I derive most value from the app is the “My Followed keyword” feature. It brings articles curated from across PubMed that are related to my words of interest. If you’re interested in sedation, this feature can bring you every new article published that mentions “ketamine” from the emergency medicine, anesthesia, EMS, pediatrics, surgery, and basic science literature. This feature ensures that you will be aware of any new work being published within your academic niche. 

“My Followed Keywords” Page

Individual Article Page

​Once you select an article, it opens the abstract. From there, you can access the full-text article, share via social media links, save the paper to a collection, and see comments about the article. The usefulness of the app completely depends on your ability to access full text articles. It provides one-tap access to the full text article PDFs if you work at the hundreds of hospitals and universities that have agreements with Read. A one-time institutional login is required for proxy access when setting up your account. After that, one-tap full text PDF access makes this app a slam dunk. If your institution does not support this, then you must consider if browsing abstracts with the intent to read the full-text at a later date on a different platform is worth the effort. 

There are competitors in the medical journal app market, and several alternatives to Read exist. While Read is more focused on medical journals and boasts a larger library of journals, apps like DocNews and Docphin add the ability to follow mainstream media news, making them feel more like a one-stop shop. DocNews also recently started offering CME credit for reading articles. Some prefer their design and user experience over Read. BrowZine has a beautiful interface and adds compatibility with other apps like Dropbox, Evernote, and Zotero.

Bottom Line: Read is an easy to use app that can help busy academicians deal with information overload by bringing you personalized and customizable curation of journal articles. If your institution supports full-text PDF access, Read offers a portable tool to keep up with the primary literature.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ - Very Useful

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By Jeff Riddell, MD

Medical Education Research Fellow
Division of Emergency Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine

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Nominations to contribute:

• Laura Welsh, MD 
• Alisha Brown, MD 
• Adaira Chou, MD