Also what other software is useful for writing formatted papers?
Nothing is better than LaTeX/XeTeX + BiBTeX to my knowledge.
Also I advocate against using overleaf as someone would suggest. I used texlive before switching to overleaf and we wrote a few papers via overleaf free tier. Sadly enough, now these papers can’t be compiled because there is not enough computational resources on a free tier. Moreover, the documents are neither versioned nor blamed which makes me difficult to go back and reflect on the papers.
I’m back to writing papers now and we’re using GitHub private repository + LaTeX+ BiBTeX which allows us to overcome all possible limitations of overleaf.