Editors’ Choice celebrates the very best apps and games—handpicked by App Store Editors around the world.

As anyone who’s written an academic paper knows, wrangling every cited book, journal article, and blog post—then putting the document into the right format—can be nearly as laborious as the writing itself. That’s why Essayist can be such a revelation.

Our favorite discovery: How Essayist uses AI to automatically add sources to our bibliography. We pasted a YouTube URL into an entry and Essayist automatically filled in the name of the video, its publication date, and the date we accessed it. When we uploaded PDFs from academic journals, Essayist filled in the title, author, and more—and stored the PDF for easy access.

We knew we loved it when: We saw how seamless adding an inline citation is. Just type an open parenthesis to bring up all of your sources. To add footnotes, figures, tables, and LaTeX equations, tap the plus sign in the toolbar.

Biggest surprise: Essayist gets an A+ as an all-around writing app too, with flexible styles, inline spell-check, and customizable backgrounds.