A few things worth sharing from our latest newsletter: a milestone moment from one of our institutional partners, an update on PERRLA’s Reference Annotator, and some big improvements to PERRLA Online that make it completely ready for dissertation-level writing.
Celebrating the first poster presentation about PERRLA
A highlight of our week at the Nurse Educators Conference in the Rockies was watching Dr. Angela D. Jones, DNP, RN, of the DeWitt School of Nursing at Stephen F. Austin State University (SFASU) present her research poster: “Formatting without the fuss: PERRLA for the win!”
The poster shared results from a collaborative pilot in which SFASU integrated PERRLA into two online cohorts – an RN-BSN program (N = 200) and an MSN program (N = 50) – from January to June 2025, with no curriculum changes and at no cost to students. Faculty saw students spend less time on APA formatting and more time on content, along with higher APA scores and greater student satisfaction. Based on those results, PERRLA is now a core tool in SFASU’s MSN program.
We’re grateful to Dr. Jones for her partnership and for sharing this work with the broader nurse educator community.
Interested in creating a case study or poster presentation with PERRLA at your own institution? Whether you’re piloting PERRLA in a single course or across an entire program, we can help you capture the outcomes and share them with the broader academic community. Reach out to Graysen Pack at schools@perrla.com to start the conversation.
Better research means easier writing
Every student knows the ritual. Read the article, highlight half of it, forget why, then scroll frantically at 11 p.m. trying to find “that one quote about the thing.”
PERRLA’s Reference Annotator retires that ritual. Students open a PDF right inside PERRLA, highlight what matters, and pin notes directly to the passage they came from. Every note stays anchored to its source and its exact spot on the page. When it’s time to write, the evidence is already organized, searchable, and attached to a properly formatted reference. No printouts, no mystery downloads, no scavenger hunts.
Because each note is tied to a real reference in the student’s PERRLA library, the citation work is essentially done before the paper starts. Pull a note into a draft and PERRLA builds the citation and reference entry in correct APA, MLA, or Turabian automatically. Students can tag notes by theme, see everything they’ve collected for a paper in one view, and go from “pile of sources” to structured argument without retyping a single quote.
The Reference Annotator comes with every PERRLA subscription at no extra cost.
Dissertation-level writing from your browser: Updates to PERRLA Online
For years, “write it in your browser” and “300-page dissertation” did not belong in the same sentence. PERRLA Online’s new editor changes that.
It shows your paper as real, true-to-print pages – with page numbers, running heads, and page breaks landing exactly where they will in the final document. Footnotes sit at the bottom of the page they belong too, the way Turabian intended. Need a landscape page for a large data table? Flip just that section sideways and keep writing. What you see on screen is what your committee gets.
The dissertation extras build themselves. Table of Contents, List of Tables, List of Figures: generated and updated automatically as the paper grows. Appendices can be added, retitled, and reordered without renumbering a thing. A navigation panel keeps every chapter, heading, and appendix one click away – which matters a lot around page 180.
And through all of it, PERRLA keeps doing what PERRLA does: formatting every heading, citation, and reference in APA, MLA, or Turabian automatically while the writer stays focused on the argument. It saves continuously in the background, because nobody’s dissertation should depend on remembering to hit Ctrl+S.
The new editor is in beta now, with full release July 20. It’s all in the same PERRLA Online students already use, synced with their reference library and research notes. Big paper, small paper – the workflow is the same. Only the page count changes.
PERRLA on the road this fall
The PERRLA team will be at three conferences this fall. If you’re attending any of these, stop by! We’d love to show you what’s new, talk site licenses, or just hear how paper season is treating your students.
NLN Education Summit – September 23–25, Washington, D.C. | Booth 213
ANLC – October 25–27, Washington, D.C.
AACN – December 3–5, Indianapolis