Citavi (reference management)

Citavi supports you in researching, managing and citing literature as well as in organizing academic work. It makes it easier to collect, structure and insert references in academic texts.

The service is aimed at all students and employees of the University of Kassel who want to write academic papers or manage literature.

The IT Service Center (ITS) of the University of Kassel is responsible for providing the Citavi campus license. The University Library offers training and support in the use of Citavi.

Citavi is a reference management software that combines functions for literature research, knowledge organization and task planning. It enables the collection of references, the organization of citations and thoughts as well as the creation of bibliographies in various citation styles.

For Mac and Linux users, Zotero is recommended as an alternative literature management software. Zotero is platform-independent and available free of charge. Further information on Zotero can be found on the library's website.

• Import of references from library catalogs and databases.

• Management of citations and own thoughts.

• Integration in Microsoft Word for the automatic creation of citations and bibliographies.

• Support for over 11,000 citation styles.

• Task planning to organize the work process.

• Save projects locally or in the Citavi Cloud.

• Citavi Picker: A browser add-on that allows you to quickly import references from the Internet.

• PDF annotation: Directly mark up and annotate PDF documents within Citavi.

• Teamwork: Ability to work on projects together and distribute tasks.

Example 1: A student uses Citavi to research literature for her bachelor's thesis, manage citations and automatically create the bibliography in Word.

Example 2: An employee uses Citavi to organize the literature and citations for a scientific article and plans tasks to structure the writing process.

• Citavi is only available for Windows.

• University e-mail address (@student.uni-kassel.de or @uni-kassel.de) for registration.

• Operating system: Windows 11 or Windows 10

• Working memory (RAM): At least 4 GB RAM

• Storage space: Approx. 300 MB for the program installation, additional storage space for project databases: at least 30 MB

• Office integration: Microsoft Word 365 or Microsoft Word 2013 (or newer) for using the Citavi Word add-in

• Browser and PDF integration: Citavi Picker supports:

  • Microsoft Edge (Chromium), Mozilla Firefox (version 48 or higher), Google Chrome (version 30 or higher), Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat (version 10 or higher, 32-bit version)

• Project data: Citavi projects are loaded completely into RAM when they are opened. Depending on the available RAM capacity and project structure, the recommended maximum number of references is between 25,000 and 50,000.

• User rights: Administration rights are required to install Citavi.

The software can be downloaded from the Citavi website. When you register on the manufacturer's website with your university email address, the campus license is automatically linked.

Citavi download and registration: https://www.citavi.com/de/download [external]

The IT Service Center answers questions about the Citavi license:

• General Citavi help pages
• Short introduction
• Slideshows

Kassel University Library offers introductions to Citavi and Zotero as well as consultation hours for both programs.

When using the Citavi Cloud, no sensitive data should be saved. We recommend saving projects locally to comply with data protection guidelines.

The campus license for Citavi is only valid for the Windows version and Citavi Web. The license is renewed every three years.