Creating and Saving Abstracts

An abstract provides a brief summary of the topic, the approach, the purpose, the most important findings and occasionally possibilities for future research. It should be written concisely and objectively.

When writing an abstract, keep the following points in mind:

• Briefly summarize the contents of the text by describing the main topic, arguments, and scope.
• Identify the work's context within the discipline: what lines of thinking does it continue? Which methods were used and/or what theoretical stance does the author take?
• Determine the author's contributions to the research: what are the key contributions of the work? What are the author's major findings? What questions remain open for investigation?

Your own opinions and critical evaluations should be recorded as an evaluation.

Adding an Abstract

If you're writing an abstract yourself, we recommend including your name and the date in brackets at the beginning of the abstract so that you do not forget that you are the author.

1. In the Reference Editor, click the Contents tab.
2. Type the abstract into the Abstract field. To use text formatting (i.e. bolding, italics, etc.), click the blue Abstract label or press F9.

Adding an Existing Abstract from the Preview

Many journal articles in electronic form already include an abstract. If this is the case, you can easily copy it into Citavi.

1. Click the name of the linked file to show it in the preview pane.
2. Highlight the abstract in the preview pane.
3. In the preview pane, click Abstract.
4. Citavi copies the highlighted text to the Abstract field.

Adding an Existing Abstract from Another Program

1. Copy the abstract to the Clipboard. In Citavi, switch to the Reference Editor.
2. Switch to the Contents tab.
3. Place the insertion point in the Abstract field and press Ctrl+V.
4. Citavi inserts the text from the Clipboard.
5. If you want to format the text, click the Abstract label or press F9.

Hint:

To preserve the formatting of the original text when pasting, press F9 to open the advanced text editor, and then press Ctrl+Shift+V to paste as formatted text. To remove all character formatting, press Ctrl+Spacebar. To remove all tabs and line breaks, press Ctrl+Shift+Spacebar.