Design and evaluation of a mobile application for educational purposes and facilitating scientific literature search for students and researchers.

Authors

Jalal Nikukaran, Alireza Fallahzadeh, Shadi Hazhir, Amir Hami, Seyed Ali Fatemi Aghda

Published in

BMC medical education. Volume 25. Issue 1. Pages 1396. Oct 10, 2025. Epub Oct 10, 2025.

Abstract

One of the needs of students and researchers is access to databases and up-to-date knowledge. Given the lack of knowledge of students in using databases and various limitations (lack of access, economic, sanctions, internet, etc.), and the spread of mobile phone use, this study aimed to design and evaluate a mobile application for offline searching of articles and journals in the field of medical sciences.
In this study, First, a checklist of important items was prepared using a review of the literature and was given to 24 experts (Medical library and information sciences, Health information management) and 16 students for validation. Based on this, scientific articles from the universities of medical sciences in Isfahan, Kashan, Shahrekord, and Yazd were collected from Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed databases, and the application was designed. Finally, the usability of the application was evaluated using the QUIS questionnaire.
According to the participants, a total of 14 items for articles(Article Title, Author Full Name, Abstract, Keywords, Publication Date, Volume, Issue, Start Page, End Page, Type, Journal Name, etc.), 16 items for journals(Journal Title, ISSN, Subject Categories, Publisher/Holder, etc.), and 10 items for technical capabilities (search of Title, abstract, keyword, etc.)were considered necessary. The overall results of the usability evaluation were reported as “good” in all groups of faculty (7.57) ,students(6.94) and librarians (6.8) ,. Only librarians at TehranUniversity of Medical Sciences rated the application as “average” in the “Terminology and System Information” Sect. (6 ± 1.77).
The mobile application improves the education and access of researchers to articles and journals. Given the advantages of the application, its use leads to greater satisfaction among users.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-025-07897-y.

PMID:
41074070
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 13 Oct 2025.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.