APA Reference Manager

Although text if found under all forms, styles and genres, authors need to use specialized standards and rules in order to make it easier to understand by everyone. Dedicated to APA style, APA Reference Manager puts a simple means of organizing such references at your disposal, with options to open and edit them anytime.

A neat advantage is that you don't have to go through a setup process because the application is portable. Besides keeping your registries intact, you can easily store it along with your projects on a USB Flash drive to use on the go.

Running it brings up a pretty compact window, with a tabbed design that provides quick access to all areas you get to work with. The simple design raises no questions, getting you quickly accommodated. Text input fields are accompanied by corresponding requirements and hitting the “Add to Sources” button stores each contact.

The application gives you the possibility to manually create APA style references or load existing ones to edit. Sadly, the only supported format is APAREF and it would have been useful at least to load TXT or CSV files. On the other hand, saved files can be opened in a basic text editor, with context being organized and readable.

There's no limit to the number of entries you can add, with the application displaying all of them in the “Sources” tab. These are enlisted along with corresponding details like author, title, sources, date, pages and type.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that APA Reference Manager is somewhere stuck along the middle of the road to success. It's easy enough to use, with intuitive requirement fields and design. However, simplicity also means that your work is limited and you can see this in the poor file support or missing documentation.