Citavi - the final extension of the campus licence

In July 2022, we had informed in an article that a termination of the campus licence of the reference management software Citavi is planned.

We would like to thank you for your active participation in our survey on this topic. Among other things, it showed us that many are working on current projects that they will still need next year. Therefore, the ICMC management has decided to extend the licence for one last year (until 30 November 2023). We hope that this will help some members of our university to finish their projects. Of course, we know that the decision will not be sufficient for everyone.

We don’t recommend the newcomers to literature management to start with Citavi. If you are sure to finish your writing project until the end of November 2023, it would not be a problem. However, for later projects you would either have to plan for costs or switch to another software.

We are happy to support you in learning the open source software Zotero with our course C4. Zotero offers possibilities for the automatic recording of literature data, the annotation of PDFs as well as the assignment of tags and the use of the data in text processing programmes in the desired citation style. Zotero runs on all operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux).

If you have Citavi projects that you need or would like to use for a longer period of time, then switching to Zotero might be an option for you. However, Citavi and Zotero are not identical. Depending on the functions used, data may be lost here (e.g. references, categories for citations, image citations, etc.). It is completely unproblematic to try out the import in Zotero, as only a backup copy of the Citavi project is used for this. We have created a video tutorial (English subtitle) and a manual for this.

If you don't want to or can't switch because, for example, extensive texts and citations have already been created using the Citavi Word plugin, then you would actually have to take care of the further financing yourself from December 2023. Look out for a discount in your personal Citavi account for switching to a private licence.