Photo: ©Mainz University of Applied Sciences

Literature management programs

Citavi

Mainz University of Applied Sciences offers you a Citavi campus license for literature management and assists you in getting started. Staff and students of our university can use this highly efficient tool for studying, teaching and research at work and at home.

What is Citavi?

Citavi supports students and researchers in all steps of working with scientific literature. It starts with research. Citavi provides access to over 4,000 library catalogs (including the catalog of Mainz University of Applied Sciences) and specialized bibliographies, whose data can be saved for further reference with just one click. And you don’t have to type in the titles of that giant stack of books on your desk. If the books have an ISBN (International Standard Book Number), and all books since 1980 have one, this number is sufficient. Citavi uses it to obtain all necessary information from the internet: author, title, publisher, year and often even the cover illustration and a brief summary.

How data becomes knowledge

First Citavi organizes the literature collection. Not every text needs to be dealt with immediately and in the same way. With Citavi’s task planning, you can define for each essay or book what has to be done with it and by when. At the click of a button, this becomes a task sheet for your next visit to the library.

The decisive factor, however, is what is done with the information collected. In Citavi, this is called ‘knowledge organization’: essentials must be separated from insignificant things and connected with existing knowledge. Citavi provides several tools for this. Literature is easy to index and categorize. The most important citations can be taken from each text, arranged systematically and connected with your own ideas, thoughts and first text drafts. In this way, a knowledge base tailored to the work objective grows continuously.

How knowledge is transferred to paper

A paper, exam project, or publication is the final step in the work process. Citavi works with almost all word processors, including LaTeX editors. With a click, the collected quotations, thoughts and source references are in the text. In the end, Citavi automatically creates the index of cited literature.

How do you get Citavi?

Create an account on citavi.com/hs-mainz.
Please note: Your email address of Mainz University of Applied Sciences (...@hs-mainz.de/...@students.hs-mainz.de) serves as authentication. You cannot order it with a free mail address (web.de, GMX, gmail, etc.).
Click on the link to download.
Please note: Administrator rights are required for installation. The installation on university computers should be done by the university's Center for Information and Communcation Technology (ZIK).

Introduction and courses

The library regularly offers introductory courses in the use of Citavi. Registration is required, do so by sending an email to citavi (at) hs-mainz.de (last name, first name, desired course date).
The library publishes scheduled dates on its website. You can bring your own laptop for the introductory course.

Note for Mac users

A version of the Citavi literature management software is not yet available for Mac. One solution for Mac users is a Windows simulation. You can find instructions for this in the Citavi manual. The library offers MAC users introductory courses in the free literature management program Zotero as an alternative.