Citavi is a program for reference management and knowledge organization for Microsoft Windows published by Swiss Academic Software in Wädenswil, Switzerland. Citavi is very widely used in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, with site licenses at most universities, many of which offer training sessions and settings files for Citavi.
Versions
Citavi began as a reference management program called LiteRat, developed at the Heinrich Heine University in 1995, and considered version 1.0. The first version to bear the Citavi name was released as Citavi 2. Version 3 was released in November 2010 and was the first version with a user interface in English. Since version 4, released in April 2013, it is possible to switch between English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish. Citavi 5 was released in April 2015, with editions for single users and teams. In February 2018, Citavi 6 adds the features to save projects in the Citavi Cloud and to share them with other users with differentiated access rights. Citavi can be used in a virtual machine on Linux or OS X. Swiss Academic Software discontinued development for an OS X native application in 2011. A web version is being developed which will be operating system agnostic.
Products
Citavi Free can be downloaded at no cost from the website, but it is limited to 100 references per project. There is no limit on the number of projects. Cloud projects are saved in the Citavi Cloud, and local projects are saved on the hard drive of the computer. Cloud projects can be shared with others, the roles that can be assigned are Reader, Author and Project leader.
With a Citavi for Windows license, this limit is lifted.
Citavi for DBServer licenses enable institutions and companies to save project data in a MS SQL Server in their Intranet. User access is managed via Active Directory, concurrent access for unlimited users with individual access rights to database is possible.
Features
Citavi's core features are reference management, knowledge organization, and task planning. Citavi's integrated quick help in context is backed up by online help tools including an online manual, an email tutorial, videos, an actively managed user forum and, for users with a license, personal support.
Knowledge organization
Citavi can extract text excerpts and images from documents as quotations, and organize them together with own ideas imported as "thoughts". Quotations and thoughts can be copied into the word processor, citations are added automatically. There are five types of quotations and two further types of ideas for text and images.
When annotated in Citavi, quotations and comments in PDF documents are linked to the exact position in the PDF document.
Citations, quotations and ideas can be categorized in Citavi to reflect the structure in chapters of the final publication, making it possible to outline the paper before beginning the actual writing process.
Task planner
Citavi includes a task planner for scheduling tasks and project milestones to organize deadlines like lending periods for books. Tasks like "Discuss" or "Examine" can be linked to specific parts in PDF documents.
In Cloud and DBServer projects it is possible to assign tasks to other team members.
Compatibility
Citavi can export data in different formats to other reference management programs, and Citavi can import references from other reference management programs, either directly, as from EndNote or BibTeX, or with an import filter or via a RIS export file, as from Mendeley, ProCite, Reference Manager, RefMe, RefWorks, Zotero, and others.
