ClinicalKey

This app worked at first then it kicked me out. Then I couldn’t get back in. I deleted and reinstalled and it worked then it kicked me out again. I have deleted and reinstalled more times that I lost count and it doesn’t work. I don’t understand all the security crap. If I’m on the website and it gives the option at the top to open in app then why doesn’t it automatically sign me in? It’s books people, books. Customer service just keeps telling me there’s nothing wrong from their POV. I have tried on different phones and iPads. Waste of time!

I have not experienced the forced logout that others have stated in their reviews and I suspect it is because I am logging in with the personal account I created after I accessed the clinical key website through my school’s library as opposed to using my school’s login credentials. My suggestion would be to try that route. As for the app itself, it functions very similar to the website. I can access the same material (including textbooks) that I could on the website. The only things I wish it had that the website had is the ability to “find on page” and change the size of the text. If I were king for a day (or, if someone from CK is reading this) I would enable web users and app users to favorite books—whole books, not just chapters or images from them. Having to constantly search for the names of textbooks gets tedious.

Elsevier publishes some of my favorite books and journals, and everything works great on a desktop or laptop, but if you are using the app on iPhone or iPad, it is a dreadful experience. You get continuous warnings that your network has changed, even when it hasn’t, and why the app even cares is beyond me. The textbook search engine will not take you to the requested textbook, and there is no list to jog your memory, just a place to enter a textbook name from memory. Searching for articles often leads you to something completely unrelated to the key words you entered. The application also will not run in the background, so if you leave to use another app, you lose everything you were looking at. Looks from reviews like these problems have been present for several years, though the app is only at v. 1.something, so not so not well attended to. Unless you plan to use clinical key only on your computer, I would skip it and go with Up to Date.