Switch from Citavi to Zotero

Reference management is a core part of academic work. KIM provides campus licenses for the reference management programmes Citavi and Endnote and offers courses on Citavi, Endnote and Zotero.
Due to internal changes at the company to which Citavi belongs, we have observed a significant deterioration in provider support since the beginning of 2021. Data protection issues are also unresolved.
Other reference management programmes have expanded the possibilities of knowledge organisation - long a unique selling point of Citavi. Therefore, the campus license for Citavi-Desktop, which runs until 31 March 2024, will not be extended.
We still offer a campus license for EndNote and recommend Zotero instead of Citavi, an open-source software that has strengthened the area of knowledge organisation in recent years.

If you have used Citavi because of knowledge organisation, we recommend switching to Zotero and have compiled information on installing Zotero for you.
Depending on your previous way of working and the status of your projects, we suggest the following procedure:

What to do?

Looking for guidance on migrating your Citavi projects?

What happens after the Citavi licence ends?

You can import locally saved projects to Zotero without a Citavi account. Backup copies are stored in your Citavi backup folder (file extension .ctv6bak). Unzip these files as described here (Zotero instructions) and then import them into Zotero.

Cloud projects in Citavi Desktop are not automatically saved locally on your computer. Once the licence expires, you will no longer be able to access them with other reference management programs. Make sure you back up your projects as local projects in advance. You can import local projects into Zotero even after the licence has expired.

Citavi Free / Discount for a private licence
Citavi is currently (01.03.2024) informing you of the upcoming licence expiry. Citavi is informing you as well of Citavi Free and a discount offer. Both offers are no longer available, and the automatic notification from Citavi seems outdated.
If you are considering purchasing a private licence, please check the current conditions with the provider.

Do you use Citavi mainly to collect literature?

Bibliographic data, keywords and full texts can easily be migrated to another reference management programme (Instructions from Zotero).

You have collected a lot of and heterogeneous data in Citavi?

Before migrating your Citavi projects, it may be helpful to clean up the projects:

You also used Citavi for knowledge organisation?

Keywords and categories that you have assigned to titles, full texts with associated annotations and knowledge items will be transferred in principle. Manual corrections will be necessary in some cases. Other parts of the knowledge organisation will not be migrated automatically but can be added subsequently in Zotero.

The deadline for your writing project is after 1 April 2024?

Unfortunately, the references in your text that you have created with Citavi cannot currently be linked automatically with Zotero.

  • If you are only at the beginning of the writing project, we recommend planning the migration before the next writing phase. Insert references directly into your text with Zotero and recreate existing Citavi-generated citations.
  • For advanced texts with many Citavi citations, we cannot currently offer a routine. We are looking for a solution that will enable you to switch over as smoothly as possible.

What about access to Citavi Web?

According to the provider, access should have been switched off in May 2023. You can still access your projects via Citavi Cloud.
If you used Citavi Web with MacOS or Linux, you can back up your data using the public computers in the library.

  • Log in to the computers with your university account and select the course environment "Uni Standardprogramme".
  • Open Citavi 6 and select the file server or the university cloud (drive H or drive N) as the storage location for your user files.
    Log in with your Citavi-account. You can open your projects from Citavi-Web via Citavi-Cloud.
  • Back up your data locally and migrate it to Zotero.
  • Access to the computers in the library is also possible remotely.

Backing up bibliographic data

If you have only recorded bibliographic data and no full texts in Citavi, you can export this data in an exchange format (BibTeX, RIS, etc.). Then import this file into another literature management programme.

Comparison of different literature management programmes (pdf, Library of the TU Munich)

Do you have further questions?

We will continuously update this page.
For the transition period until the end of the contract period with Citavi, we offer courses on switching from Citavi to Zotero. All dates can be found in ZEuS (Interdisciplinary Courses and Offers → Courses of other Institutions → Department of Computer-, Information- and Media competencies (KIM)

For specific questions about switching from Citavi to Zotero, please contact citavi.kim@uni-konstanz.de.