• © Universität Bielefeld

Reference Management and Knowledge Organization

Our campus license Citavi

Reference management - that is collecting, recording and organising literature, bibliographic data, text passages, notes and summaries - has become an important key qualification in the domain of research methodology in recent years.

Therefore Bielefeld University Library offers free use of the reference management software Citavi to all members of the university (campus license since 2008). This service includes general and subject-specific tuitions and consulting services for the use of the software.

Campus license Citavi

Team Reference Management

Do you have questions about Citavi? The reference management team will be happy to help you. We offer an extensive repertoire of workshops, training and further education courses and are also available to answer individual questions. Please feel free to contact us:
literaturverwaltung.ub@uni-bielefeld.de

Our introductory e-book:

Scientific work with Citavi 6 (PDF)

Further assistance:

Short introduction Citavi 6

Citavi functions in a complete overview

Official support area Citavi

What is the advantage of using Citavi?

With Citavi you can i.a.

  • Automatically fill in book or article data (e.g. by entering the ISBN)
  • Collect and organise references and enhance them with abstracts, keywords and comments
  • Import search results from databases and references from other programmes
  • Automatically create reference lists (with selectable citation styles)
  • Collect important citations and ideas for a research paper
  • Schedule tasks at hand by deadlines, significance and state of study
  • Search for citations via comfortable plugin directly in Word with immediate embedding. Short title records and a reference list are immediately displayed in the corresponding citation style.

Download / personal license key


Step 1: Download and install Citavi Free

Citavi 6 runs on computers with Windows 10, 8, 7 and also on Windows Server 2012

Download Citavi 6

Step 2: Create personal Citavi Account

Please register for a Citavi account. Please note, when you sign-up it is necessary to authenticate as member of Bielefeld University using your university mail address (@ uni-bielefeld.de).

Create Citavi account

Step 3: Important: Download the configuration file with Bielefeld specifications

Download configuration file

Please click on "Save target as" in the context menu with the right mouse button.

If you install this file in Citavi, you will get a default selection of the most important local databases (Bielefeld University Library catalogue and more), so that e.g. call number / class mark are automatically added. Upload the saved file to Citavi by simply clicking on "Import settings" in the "Extras" menu in Citavi. The file must be uploaded in ".csd" format. If the file has a different extension, simply rename it ".csd"