Compare the Top Reference Management Apps for iPad as of July 2025

What are Reference Management Apps for iPad?

Reference management software helps researchers, students, and academics organize and manage their sources and citations for writing papers, articles, or reports. These tools enable users to collect, store, and categorize references from books, journals, websites, and other sources. They often include features for generating citations and bibliographies in various formats (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.), saving time and ensuring accuracy. Many reference management tools integrate with word processors, allowing users to easily insert citations and create reference lists directly within their documents. Additionally, these platforms often provide collaboration features, making it easy to share and manage research projects with team members. Compare and read user reviews of the best Reference Management apps for iPad currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    Citationsy

    Citationsy

    Citationsy

    Let’s say you’re writing an essay or thesis. You have a bunch of different references in your bibliography, but you don’t know exactly how to format them. Does the title go in Italics? What is et al. and when do you use it? What is APA 5th Edition and how is it different from the 6th Edition? Why are there different editions? This is where Citationsy comes in. What if you never had to think about any of this again? Citationsy lives in the cloud and is accessible from anywhere. Use our iPhone and Android apps to cite books on the go with our barcode scanner and add the Chrome or Firefox extensions to cite websites in 2 clicks. Your citation data is saved in the cloud and backed up every 10 minutes. Never worry about file formats, data loss, or updates ever again. Citationsy is a clean, annoyance-free environment to get your work done in. Say goodbye to flashing ads, notification, cookie banners, and downloads.
    Starting Price: $4.99 per month
  • 2
    Bookends

    Bookends

    Sonny Software

    Bookends is a 64-bit full-featured and cost-effective bibliography, reference, and information management system for students and professionals. Bookends requires Mac macOS 10.13 or later (including Catalina, macOS 10.15). Bookends is unicode-savvy, so you can mix Roman (English, French, German, etc.) and non-Roman (Japanese, Greek, Hebrew, etc.) characters. A highly configurable, interactive, and editable interface lets you work with reference information the way you want. View Groups or Term Lists (Authors, Keywords, etc.) on the left. In the concise reference view on the right, arrange fields in any order, show just the ones that you find useful, and label them as you like. Editing or entering information is a single click away. Show attachments (pdfs, text files, images, etc.), or use the reference’s URL to show live web pages of its contents. Notecards let you enter, edit, and rearrange your thoughts, and make citing pages in footnotes a snap.
    Starting Price: $39.99 one-time payment
  • 3
    NoodleTools

    NoodleTools

    NoodleTools

    NoodleTools is an online research management platform that promotes critical thinking and authentic research. Students stay organized as they evaluate information, build accurate citations, archive source material, take notes, outline topics, and prepare to write. Three differentiated levels support individual students across grades and abilities. The classroom environment allows librarians and teachers to provide feedback, monitor individual contributions to group work, and view statistics about source use. In contrast to an auto-cite, auto-evaluate product, we support students to engage deeply in research and produce original work. NoodleTools is also designed with online student privacy in mind. Recognize and evaluate relevant, credible sources. Generate accurate MLA, APA, and Chicago references with personal help from experts. Make connections, develop original ideas and articulate arguments.
    Starting Price: $15 per year
  • 4
    ReadCube Papers
    Search across your favorite scholarly search engines (in app and via our handy browser extensions) and enjoy 1-click downloads to quickly add references & full-text PDFs to your library. Check out our personalized recommendation engine and related article feeds to ensure you never miss an important paper again. Papers helps you focus on the task at hand with our full-screen Enhanced PDF reader. Highlight, underline, strike through, make inline notes, draw and add sticky notes. Switch between different documents with tabs, view supplemental files or jump to referenced articles - conveniently linked inline. Papers automatically identifies and matches imported articles with not only the complete metadata, but also available supplemental data, citations and full-text (if available). Papers users can create private shared collections to collaborate with up to 30 other Papers users at a given time. Simply add your collaborator by email and they will be added to your shared folder.
    Starting Price: $3 per month
  • 5
    nXr

    nXr

    NXR Systems

    nXr reference manager breaks away from the existing managers by optimally integrating three modules (nXr.iNote, nXr.iLibrary and nXr.iCite) to facilitate: - Faster note and image collection in a note and image searchable library - Direct citation based on notes, images as well as article titles for accurate citing or quoting. - Easy sharing of all cited materials (e.g., notes or images) for easy and accurate reviewing and reading. You can also create a single user–group switchable library for your research group which automatically anonymously integrate all group articles and annotations and make them available to all group users. To become the best reference manager equipped with next-generation tools for performing reproducible impactful research by managing information overload, nXr strives to incorporate new features supported by data analytics and AI.
    Starting Price: $3/month/user
  • 6
    Sciwheel

    Sciwheel

    Sciwheel

    Save references directly from the web, including Google Scholar and PubMed. Whenever you come across an interesting article we’ll save the web link, full citation data and the PDF (when available). You can see your notes and co-author comments without leaving your document. Once you make a note, you can easily search to find them. Notes are accessible wherever you view the article or PDF on the web. Our algorithm suggests articles to ensure you never miss an important paper. You can also search for related articles while writing your paper. Find your references and search multiple databases, all within Microsoft Word and Google Docs. Automatically generate your bibliography in one of 7,000+ styles. Never miss an important article with Smart citation suggestions*. Read, annotate and save articles from any computer, mobile or tablet (Android and iOS). Have all your references, notes and suggested articles available across your devices.
    Starting Price: $9.95 per month
  • 7
    Paperpile

    Paperpile

    Paperpile

    Paperpile offers clean and simple and reference management for the web. Sync your library to all your devices and read and annotate like on paper on your iPad, iPhone, or Android device. Cite your papers in Google Docs and Microsoft Word. Organize your papers with folders, labels and stars. Search your library in real-time. Automatically fix references with incomplete data and clean up duplicates. Download PDFs with one click and sync them directly to your Google Drive. Your files are available immediately on all your devices. Google Drive provides enough storage for even the largest libraries. Highlight the important parts of your papers in different colors. Add comments right where they belong. Use private sharing links to share with everyone, not just Paperpile users. With Paperpile you now can also manage your references collaboratively, and Google Docs makes it easy to collaborate with your colleagues on a paper.
    Starting Price: $2.99 per month
  • 8
    wizdom.ai

    wizdom.ai

    wizdom.ai

    With comprehensive and current insights, wizdom.ai helps you explore the rapidly evolving research landscape to assist with your next ground breaking idea. Have all the critical insights about research at your institution and globally, to monitor, evaluate and boost your performance. wizdom.ai provides publishers invaluable intelligence about global research publishing to help them distinguish the most promising research. Track powerful, in-depth analytics about your complete publications portfolio including authors, impact, subject areas and competition. Discover emerging research areas through analysis of global publications, citations and grant trends to launch new journal. Integrate the world’s largest research knowledge graph right on your website to enrich your content and empower readers. Lead your industry using comprehensive analytics to determine and shape the future of your breakthrough research.
  • 9
    Mendeley

    Mendeley

    Mendeley

    Add papers directly from your browser with a few clicks or import any documents from your desktop. Access your library from anywhere. Windows, Mac, Linux and all browsers. Generate references, citations and bibliographies in a whole range of journal styles with just a few clicks. Build your personal Mendeley library to organize, search and read all your references. Also available: Mendeley Cite, the new citation add-in for Microsoft® Word, takes the time out of referencing. Being able to work seamlessly is vital to you. So, as well as searching your Mendeley library and inserting individual or multiple references and bibliographies in just a few clicks, with Mendeley Cite you can: Cite without having Mendeley Desktop open or even installed, minimizing potential performance loss.
  • Previous
  • You're on page 1
  • Next