Short Titles, Citations, and Citation Keys

Short titles  helps identify references in your Citavi project.

Citavi assigns a Short Title to every newly added reference. The short title serves as a unique identifier for the reference in your project.

Citavi follows this template when creating a short title: author's last name, year of publication, first words of title, e. g. Bawden 2001 – Information and digital literacies.

You can change a reference's short title:

1. Click More .
2. Click Change short title.
3. Enter a new short title.
4. Click OK .

Short citations help identify works cited in your publication

Short citations are automatically created based on your citation style as soon as you insert a reference in your text using the Word Add-in. It appears as a reference number style [24] or author-year combination (Mueller 2013b, p. 14) in the text, or as a full citation in a footnote. Citavi ensures that every in-text citation refers unambiguously to a corresponding entry in the bibliography.

The short citation is not visible in your project.

Citation keys provide a highly condensed form of a reference.

Citation keys are used in two situations:

• In citation styles that contain full references in footnotes, the citation is often shortened the second and subsequent times when the reference is cited. A title may be shortened to a single keyword, for example. Citavi makes recommendations (for example, the first two words of a title, not counting articles), but you generally will need to check or edit them. Along with publisher information, the citation key, and the page number, you would then see entries in the footnotes such as: Mueller/Schmidt, History Cologne [instead of: A History of the City of Cologne], p. 14.
• Some citation styles , for example in computer science, use abbreviations instead of numbers. A 2009 work co-authored by Mueller, Schmidt, and Weingarten would thus appear as [MuScWe09].

For these kinds of special citations keys, Citavi offers Citation key support