Features: Like GoodNotes, Notability offers handwriting, text, and multimedia integration. It’s known for its audio recording feature, which syncs with handwritten notes, allowing users to listen to specific parts of a lecture or meeting by tapping on the associated note.

Organisation: Notability organises notes by subjects and dividers rather than folders, and while it lacks handwriting search, its simplicity and audio features make it popular among students.

Features: OneNote is a free, cross-platform app that supports typing, drawing, multimedia, and organisation of notes into notebooks, sections, and pages. It’s also compatible with Microsoft Office and integrates well with other Microsoft products.

Organisation: OneNote has extensive organisation features with nested pages and tags, making it ideal for complex projects or long-term academic notes.

Features: Known for its web-clipping tool, Evernote allows users to save text, images, audio, and web content directly into notes. Evernote also has powerful search functionality, including scanning and searching handwriting from images.

Organisation: It organises content into notebooks and stacks with tagging, suitable for users who want an all-in-one workspace for notes, task management, and personal organisation.

Features: Apple Notes has become increasingly versatile, with support for typed notes, checklists, attachments, tables, and sketches. It’s deeply integrated into the Apple ecosystem, making it easy to share notes and use the app across Apple devices.

Organisation: With folders and tags, Apple Notes is simple yet effective for users who need straightforward note-taking across Apple devices.

Features: Obsidian is a markdown-based note-taking app with a focus on “linked thinking.” It allows for bi-directional linking between notes, creating a web of ideas similar to a knowledge graph.

Organisation: Excellent for users who want interconnected notes and a powerful tool for personal knowledge management rather than just linear note-taking.

Purpose: Scite is a citation-based tool that helps users understand how scientific papers have been cited and discussed by other researchers. Its unique feature is the classification of citations into three categories: supporting, contrasting, and mentioning.

Key Features:

• Citation Context Analysis: Scite shows how other papers cite a study, helping users see if it’s been cited to support, contrast, or simply mention the research.

• Smart Citations: Provides insights into whether a paper is widely supported or debated in the field, which can save time when evaluating studies’ reliability.

• Research Dashboards: Tracks key trends in a field, showing citation networks and evidence trails for specific research questions.

Best For: Researchers who want a nuanced understanding of the impact of specific studies, or who are conducting literature reviews and need to quickly evaluate the credibility and consensus around papers.

Purpose: SciSpace is a comprehensive research assistant platform that includes reading, writing, formatting, and AI-powered literature analysis tools. It’s especially helpful for students and researchers who need to streamline the process of writing and citing.

Key Features:

• AI Assistant: Uses an AI assistant, CoPilot, to help understand complex text in research papers, making it easier to digest and summarise content.

• Document Formatting: Offers automatic formatting for thousands of journal templates, which is particularly useful when preparing manuscripts for submission.

• Writing and Citation Management: Provides in-line citation tools and reference management, making it a convenient all-in-one tool for research and writing.

• Research Discovery: Integrates with other databases, helping users find relevant articles quickly and gain AI-generated insights from the literature.

Best For: Researchers and students looking for an AI-driven tool to aid in understanding, writing, and formatting research papers, especially those new to navigating complex studies.

Purpose: Connected Papers is a visual tool that helps users discover related academic papers and understand the context and development of a research topic. It creates a network graph based on a selected paper, showing related work without depending solely on citation counts.

Key Features:

• Visual Graph of Related Papers: Generates a graph of papers that are algorithmically related to the selected paper, allowing users to explore a topic from various angles.

• Contextual Paper Discovery: Uses a similarity metric to identify papers that may be relevant even if they haven’t cited or been cited by the initial paper, which often reveals newer or adjacent research.

• Research Exploration: Ideal for finding foundational and peripheral research that may not show up in standard citation-based searches.

Best For: Researchers who want to explore the broader context of a topic, identify seminal papers, or discover lesser-known but related studies that aren’t immediately visible through traditional citation networks.