Citavi is a reference manager which works well with various word processor software. However, Citavi is more than reference manager. It also provides tools for users to quote important texts, to write summary and to arrange the references according to your article's structure. After you have done those, when you are working with your article, Citavi will detect the current chapter of your article and will show you relevant references and knowledge (those quotations and summaries that you have made before). Very handy! Citavi also provides a free student version which allows users to manage up to 100 references. This is very generous, considering Citavi has excellent features necessary for writing scientific articles.

Citavi does not work on Mac. Users need to install third party software to allow Citavi in a Mac. That's a shame since this limits the user base.

By using a literature program you want to collect knowledge and want to share it. Working together in a team can be done now with the cloud version very easily without boundaries. Making comments, notes and using the citations for the resulting article can be done quickly and efficiently.

The list of features is very long. All in all it is the easyness of using the program at first which makes it possible to use it for beginners and also later on for real research. We can make Citavi as required for our students without making them troubles - it is the opposite. Often students discover that they get more time concentrating on the content and do not have to think about citation rules, e.g.

For sure there are missing features - this is always the case when you use a software as this is a living process. But the missing points are on a high level. Often it could be discovered that they have been built in already when asking the support people. So, there is no speacial feature which could be presented here.

The category function, where you can categorize your literature sources, meaning divide your literature sources per topic. You can take notes or extract portion of a document and label it as direct or indirect citation

It's free of charge until 100 references. This is few for a normal project/manuscript or for a thesis

- It offers everything you need for research (finding texts, analysing texts, formatting the in-text citations and the Works Cited, etc.) - It helps you keep track of your tasks (which texts do I still have to read/scan/borrow, etc.) - The customisable categories and keywords are extremely helpful when you quickly need to find all titles concerned with a specific topic. - Allows you to compile grouped lists of titles (e.g. all titles from a certain time span or all titles within a certain category). - Allows you to search all of your quotes and all OCR’d pdfs in your project at once. - The support is phenomenal! They answer extremely fast and always propose helpful individual solutions. I once had a pretty big bug in my project and the support spend several days solving it – even though I’m only a PhD student. Long story short: I couldn’t write my PhD thesis without Citavi.

It might be a bit too complex for undergraduate students, but with their 10-25 pages papers and 30 secondary sources max, they don’t need a knowledge management system anyways. I’d say the best time to start using Citavi is in your first M.A. semester.

I have been using Citavi since my last years of high school all through university and for my PhD thesis. Without citavi, I would not know how to effectively organize my sources. With citavi, it is super easy to keep track of thousands of sources and also retrieve them again after years, even if you didnt know anymore that you have a source.

The product is incredibly powerful. In my opinion, there are two core functions: on the one hand, you can use Citavi to organize materials (like papers and other files). On the other hand, you can use citavi to facilitate citing those materials when writing papers. But, you do not have to use both. Already, the organizing function is incredibly powerful.

Personally, I am not missing anything. But you have to keep in mind that it is an incredible powerful tool, so you need time to discover those functions you need most.