As anyone who’s written an academic paper knows, wrangling every book, journal article, and blog post you cited—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.

Essayist gives you an easy way to organize a dizzying array of primary sources. Ebooks, podcasts, presentations, and even direct messages and emails can be catalogued with academic rigour. Using macOS Foundation Models, Essayist extracts all the key info needed to use it as a source

For example, paste a YouTube URL into an entry and Essayist automatically fills in the name of the video, its publication date, and the date you accessed it. Drag in an article as a PDF to have Essayist fill in the title, author, and more—and store the PDF for easy access. You can also search for the books and journal articles you’re citing right in the app.

As you write, Essayist does the detail-oriented work of formatting in the citation style of your choice (Chicago, MLA, and many others), ensuring everything from your inline citations to your entire bibliography will make the grade

All of the sources you add for one paper get saved to an overarching library in the app’s Reference Manager—and that just may change the way you write. By putting everything you’ve ever referenced a few clicks away, Essayist makes it simple to find forgotten sources and write with more authority.

That may be one of Essayist’s most distinguished skills: Helping ensure every idea you put forth is grounded in the facts, and, just as importantly, rigorously referenced.

Need to add a perfectly formatted table of contents, abstract, or appendix (or three) in your document? Click the three dots, then click Manage Sections. From there, just drag and drop to rearrange any section

Essayist cofounders Erin Guest and Till Konitzer volunteer at an avian wildlife hospital in Vancouver, Canada; their love of nature is why the app’s sample documents, images, and videos feature papers about whale sharks, clouded leopards, and rock pigeons

Guest and Konitzer came up with the idea for Essayist when Konitzer was writing his thesis and—like many students—struggled with references and citations. At the time they lacked the coding skills to pull it off; they taught themselves to code during pandemic lockdowns.