About Citation Styles

Unfortunately, there is no standard format for citations. Each discipline has its own needs and traditions, and departments and institutions often have their own variations. Many publishers and periodicals have "house styles" that you must follow in order for your work to be published. In Citavi you can select from many 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:

• In in-text citation styles, citations appear either in author-date format, in reference number format or as citation keys.
• In footnote styles, citations appear either with complete reference information or in author-date format.

The Citation Style Determines Whether or Not a Bibliography Appears

Most citation styles that use a full citation in the footnote do not include a bibliography. In the Options menu in the Add-In for Word you can manually exclude or include 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. Just use our Online form to request a style. Using the Citation Style Editor you can easily make small changes to a style.