About Citation Styles

Academic publications need to be consistently formatted. Citavi's citation styles help you fulfill this requirement. You can choose from thousands of different citation styles.

The Citation Style Determines where Citations Appear

Citation styles describe how a reference should be cited in the text and in the bibliography. There are two main types of citation styles:

The Citation Style Determines Whether or Not a Bibliography Appears

Some footnote citation styles don't use a bibliography.

The Citation Style Includes Language Elements: editor, vol., pp.

The citation style you use depends on your language of publication. If you're writing a text in English, make sure you choose an English-language citation style. This will ensure that editors in the bibliography are described with the word Editors, that Vol. appears before volumes and that page ranges include pp.

For the citation style to be applied correctly, you need to make sure that bibliographic information was correctly entered in your project. You can see this in the following example: an edited book was edited by Maria Garcia, Susan Miller and Peter Thomas Smith. In Citavi you added the names like this: Garcia, Maria; Miller, Susan; Smith, Peter Thomas. The citation style will change the appearance, for example to: Garcia, M, S Miller & PT Smith (eds.). For this reason, it's important to enter names completely, but without any textual additions. The same applies to quotation page ranges. Do not enter additions such as "p." but do enter the whole page range.

You Almost Never Need to Create a Citation Style Yourself

Citavi has its own citation style, the Citavi Default Style which is adequate for work in many disciplines. Citavi also includes hundreds of citation styles, including common styles like APA, MLA, and Chicago as well as the styles of many publishers and periodicals. We are also happy to add additional citation styles to Citavi, as long as they are the official styles of scholarly journals or academic publishers and documentation is available. There is a fee for this service. Use our online form to inquire.

Please note:

Using the Citation Style Editor in Citavi Desktop you can easily make small changes to a style. If you only work with Citavi Web, it is not possible to edit citation styles.