Rating: Excellent.
Platform: IPhone/iPad.
Cost: Free trial (Then $39.99/year).
Strong Points: Intuitive interface and easy-to-populate references; also has a desktop companion app.
Weak Points: Currently only available for iOS devices.
If you’re tired of digging through style manuals and fighting with reference management software, try Essayist. The app makes it easy to format and cite your manuscript as you go and allows you to manage all of your references in one place. Essayist prompts users to pick a citation style as soon as they create a new document. Common citation styles like APA and MLA are included in the app, but users can also find some publishing-specific standards such as those for Elsevier and Mary Ann Liebert. Within each document, users can easily format text and add in-text citations from their reference list. Reference lists can be created within the app from numerous sources, such as directly from Google Scholar or through other reference management apps such as BibTeX. Documents can also be easily exported or printed from the app. Essayist is a fantastic tool for academic writing that helps keep you organized and reduces the time you spend digging through reference managers.
