By handling the time-consuming work of organizing sources and formatting everything perfectly, this App Store Award–winning word processor frees students, scholars, and researchers to focus on the really big ideas.

What we love: As you write, Essayist automatically formats your document in the academic style of your choice (Chicago, MLA, and more than 10,000 others). It’s an easy way to ensure everything from your inline citations to your bibliography will make the grade.

Quick tip: Make academic papers easier to read by connecting Essayist to its new companion app, Researchist. This PDF reader can summarize specific sections of a document, extract tables, and link footnotes to their bibliography citations on the fly.

Meet the creator: Erin Guest and Till Konitzer are self-taught coders in Vancouver, British Columbia. They developed Essayist while Konitzer was writing his thesis and couldn’t find an app that suited his needs.