# R Discovery: Academic Research — user reviews > 44 indexed App Store user reviews of R Discovery by CACTUS COMMUNICATIONS SERVICES PTE. LTD, rated 4.80/5 from 910 ratings. - Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/r-discovery-academic-research/id1508182175/reviews - App overview in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/r-discovery-academic-research/id1508182175.md - Rating breakdown: 5★ 806 · 4★ 63 · 3★ 19 · 2★ 12 · 1★ 10 ## What do users think of R Discovery? Overall sentiment: neutral **Pros** - 👍 Wonderful site for research professionals - 🚀 Fantastic app for researchers - 💡 Provides relevant paper recommendations **Cons** - 🐛 Slow and choppy performance - 🐛 Buggy and unreliable features - 🐛 Difficult to use certain core functions - 🐛 Downloading PDFs doesn't work **Commonly reported bugs** - Home screen takes a long time to load - Audio translation feature doesn't work - Buttons are extremely slow - Switching between dark and light mode is glitchy **Most requested features** - Add option to view author information in preview - Enable screen rotation for iPad users - Add more advanced search functionality - Allow canceling of export in progress - Improve integration with Zotero ## Newest reviews (15 of 44) ### 4/5 — 언어가..? *2026-02-03* 한국어좀 만들어주세요 ### 3/5 — 横にならない *2025-04-17* iPad で開くときに強制的になり不便 ### 3/5 — Does not support landscape and split view in ipad *2025-01-29, version 3.4.0* The app is great since the recommendations are on spot but it is frustrating to use in ipad because it does not support landscape view and split view. When you need to multi-task (take notes while reading), split view is very important. I hope the developers can provide this update soon. ### 4/5 — Please enable screen rotation for ipad users... *2024-07-14* It's a good app but PLEASE enable screen rotation for ipad users... **Developer response:** Hi there! Thank you so much for your feedback and for sharing your suggestion. We will definitely forward this to our relevant team. If you have any more suggestions for us, we encourage you to reach out at discovery@researcher.life. We would love to hear from you! ### 3/5 — Great idea, but app doesn't work *2024-06-01* The Home Screen is loading for three days now, audio translation is in the promo banners but doesn't exist in reality, buttons in the search are extremely slow. Also sometimes I don't understand what all these sections are. Also I would like to have more advance search functionality. But for now it's impossible to use. **Developer response:** Hi there! Thank you for your detailed feedback, and we apologize for the inconvenience you're experiencing. To help us investigate and resolve these issues, could you please email us at discovery@researcher.life? This will allow us to check your specific account and provide a solution. We’re eager to assist you and improve your experience! ### 3/5 — useful but flaws *2024-03-06, version 3.2.3* Very good but within a few minutes of using it found several really inconvenient difficulties with it - wanted to let them know, but you try finding a simple email address to write to them!! ### 4/5 — Fantastic app *2024-01-24, version 3.2.0* As a researcher, this app is incredibly valuable. I often use it to browse unrelated topics in an easy and intuitive manner. Highly recommend. To the developers; please consider horizontal rotation when viewing pdfs! This would make the app a lot easier to use. Many thanks ### 3/5 — I want to love this app… *2023-12-25* The app is great and has a lot of features that are great for students and researchers. I love that I can select topics and journals that are relevant to me and that it provides me plenty of OpenAccess options. However, the app is super clunky and slow. It seems bloated on the back end and it makes the app almost unusable. I think I may just use it to get a reading list going and then read the articles on another app like Zotero or Reader. **Developer response:** Hi! Thanks for taking the time and sharing your feedback with us. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience you faced with R Discovery. We request you to please write to us at discovery@researcher.life with your registered email ID, and we will try to fix this as soon as possible for you. Regards. ### 3/5 — Two small *2023-11-20* Can not read paper going to cancel **Developer response:** Hi, we sincerely apologize for the difficulty you faced with R Discovery. Could you please share more details about the issue by writing to us at discovery@researcher.life? We're sorry for missing your feedback before but we promise we'll look into it as soon as we hear from you. We hope that you'll give us the chance to improve your experience. Thanks ### 3/5 — Usability issues *2023-11-02* The functionality of the app is fantastic. But certain common functions are just impossible to use efficiently. “Save To List” should be a core mechanic in the app, but it’s like the developers have never actually used it themselves… changing the selected categories in this UI is a nightmare ### 4/5 — Date filter *2023-03-11, version 2.6.3* I do not find the possibility to filter the last five years literature. ### 4/5 — Love it! *2023-02-26, version 2.6.3* A few suggestions, just to make it better: - Add a filter to the feed to see only open access papers - Add a feature to read the papers within the app, or as an EPUB format - Add a note when saving a paper ### 4/5 — Additional features would be great! *2023-01-12, version 2.5.9* Really cool idea, but app is still somewhat glitchy and switches between dark and light mode. Would also be great to have other options for filtering feed, such as chronological order of publication, or ordering by journal impact factor. ### 4/5 — Really promising app, landscape mode for IPad/tablet would push it to 5 star!! *2023-01-11, version 2.5.9* Looking forward to using the app for my literature reviews. The app itself is well made and clean. As mentioned in the title, including the option to rotate to landscape mode would seal the deal for me! ### 3/5 — Great for for iPhone, okay for iPad *2023-01-07, version 2.5.8* Great app for paper discovery. The iPad app doesn’t handle landscape mode and just seems like a zoomed in version of the iPhone app. Gets irritating when reading everything else in landscape and switching back and forth and jarring with the sizing difference ## Most critical reviews (10 lowest-rated) ### 1/5 — Doesn’t work *2025-03-20* I tried with two projects to get it to show reliable journals but is did not show a single article from a high ranked journal even when you added those journals to projects. Instead it showed a bizarre list of dubious specialist publications many in languages I don’t read. ### 1/5 — What a Hyped App *2024-11-19* Forget about the pdf of the top suggested papers. This app is not able to provide a summary of the top 15 works on a particular theme. It cannot provide the summary of a famous sociological work. There is no point of this app. Other free AI does far better than this paid one. Disappointed ### 1/5 — 가로모드 안 됨 *2024-11-04* 2년 전 리뷰에 가로모드 지원 안 된다고 있었지만, 시간이 많이 지났으니 수정됐을거라 믿고 다운 받았으나 여전히 안 됨. 아이패드 버전이 없는 건가?? 아이패드를 세워서 쓸 수 있는 방법이 없어서 그냥 지움. 제대로 써보지도 않고 별점 1점을 준 이유는, 이 앱이 지금 나에게 딱 필요한 앱인데 쓸 수 없어서 생긴 실망감과 시간만 날린 것에 대한 짜증에 대한 항의 표시임. ### 1/5 — useless *2023-03-02* downloads don’t work, can’t copy doi, what’s the point of a crappy app that does not work? it used to work but now fail constantly -too bad it was good once upon a time! **Developer response:** Hi there, we do have the download PDF option available on the app, however, this is limited to open-access articles only. You may have to pay the journal subscription fees on articles that are pay-walled before you can download the PDFs. Hope this helps. Do let us know if you have any other feedback or suggestions to share by writing to us at discovery@researcher.life. We'll be happy to hear from you. ### 1/5 — No option for Offline PDF *2022-09-17* Downloading PDFs for offline reading doesn’t work. **Developer response:** Hi there, we do have the download PDF option available on the app, however, this is limited to open-access articles only. You may have to pay the journal subscription fees on articles that are pay-walled before you can download the PDFs. Hope this helps. Do let us know if you have any other feedback or suggestions to share by writing to us at discovery@researcher.life. We'll be happy to hear from you. ### 1/5 — Won’t work *2021-01-20, version 1.6.1* Or let me create an account **Developer response:** Hi, we're very sorry for the difficulty you faced. Would it be possible to share a few details about the issue by writing to us at discovery@researcher.life? We're sorry for missing your feedback before but we promise we'll look into it as soon as we hear from you. We hope that you'll give us the chance to improve your experience. Thanks, Janet ### 2/5 — Not as great as I’d hoped *2026-05-17* It’s clunky and overpriced, imo. It’s not a bad app, but there’s are a confusing number of non-essential features that it is overwhelming to use. Most of the simple but most useful features (like “just-published”) are behind a paywall… and a 24-hr only free trial is wild. ### 2/5 — Does really hold the bat quality they advertise *2026-01-05* Felt like a rather sloppy GUI wrapper around a couple of search engines APIs with very finicky AI features that bring no value, and even the recommendation system wouldn’t find paper that would really match my field and interests. ### 2/5 — Canceling “export in progress” *2024-01-05* Wonderful app! However, is there any way to cancel a pending excel export/job in progress? The loading icon being on the interface for 2 days has been aggravating and is ruining the app experience for me. ### 2/5 — Not very performant… *2023-12-31* I want to love this app but it is extremely slow. The scrolling is so choppy I can barely reading on it. I feel like this should be a fairly simple fix, but until then, I'll just keep using Web of Science **Developer response:** Hi JamesLear! We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience you have faced with R Discovery. Could you please email us at discovery@researcher.life with your registered email ID? So we can fix this issue as soon as possible. Regards. ## Most praised reviews (10 highest-rated) ### 5/5 — One of the best *2026-07-05* Great app for researching anything. Really great ### 5/5 — Mr *2025-10-16, version 3.4.0* It’s a wonderful site for research related professionals. ### 5/5 — Memory loss *2025-02-28* What’s the point ### 5/5 — Please consider the option to add authors in preview *2024-12-01* works amazing! It would be great to have the option to turn on view with the first and corresponding author in preview boxes of each article ### 5/5 — Helpful *2023-08-01* Good **Developer response:** Thank you for rating us 5 stars, Ayan. Do tell your friends and colleagues about the app too. If you have any suggestions for improvement, let us know at discovery@researcher.life! ### 5/5 — Some suggestions *2023-06-09, version 3.0.0* This is a good app. But when I link to the zotero, it just an URL not a pdf. Moreover, the pdf I download in app I cannot open by other app. I hope developers can fix it soon ### 5/5 — Best app at its subject *2022-11-24, version 2.5.2* The best app i could possibly think of, to fill the knowledgegaps the (german) educationsystem leaves open and unadressed. ### 5/5 — Best research app/tool I’ve used (and I’ve tried them all) *2022-10-29, version 2.3.5* I’m a final year PhD student who has just started writing my thesis. It’s such a chaotic process and R discovery has been such a help. It’s structured my reading, helped me find all the relevant papers I need, it’s constantly sending me emails with new papers in my research area so I’m able to come to research meetings and impress my supervisors! It’s saved me so much time it’s unreal. So much love for this & the fact it’s completely free (with no catch) is the icing on the cake. If you haven’t downloaded this yet - what are you doing??!?!? ### 5/5 — Reliable, Authentic and legitimate *2022-09-14, version 2.3.5* This is very recommended app. I actually found this app in coincidence, I was just searching related studies and it cane out. I downloaded it out of curiosity and luckily it works. This app is very useful. It helps me alot. Oh well thanks to all who made this app! Amazing. Remember you don’t need subscription you just your institution to get full access. ### 5/5 — R for Researcher saviour *2022-08-10* I’m glad I stumbled upon this product. It has been really easy sailing through the tiring part of searching and filtering through an overwhelming number of publications with R Discovery. Simply Love it! A HUGE recommendation for researchers globally, be it from any field! **Developer response:** Hi Gayatri, your review has made our day, thank you so much for the lovely words and for the recommendation! We're glad to hear that R Discovery has made the process of finding research easier for you. Please let us know if there's any other feedback you have for us by writing to us at discovery@researcher.life. --- *Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-09-10.*