Additional Hints for Working with Quotation Types

In the chapter Basic Principles of Citation you learned which quotation types Citavi offers and how you can work with them. Once you understand how excerpting works, it's not hard to quickly choose the corresponding citation type. You'll see that differentiating between quotation types makes your workflow easier.

There are three advantages:

• On the Quotations, Comments tab you will see a comprehensive view of all of your excerpted text.
• The many excerpts you created appear individually in the Knowledge Organizer. You can freely work with these knowledge elements and export them to other projects as well.
• You'll always cite your sources properly.

There may be situations in which you want to combine direct and indirect quotations with your own thoughts and comments. For example in a book, the chapters 2, 3, and 6 might interest you, since these directly deal with your topic. The chapters 1, 4, 5, and 7 may deal with questions that are not relevant for you. However, you may want to at least capture the basic ideas in these chapters. When excerpting you would take two different approaches. For chapters 2, 3, and 6 you would excerpt in a more detailed way. For chapters 1, 4, 5, and 7 you would want to create a summary. This ensures that you'll be able to reconstruct the main ideas of the book and the context in which the excerpted chapters are embedded later on. These types of excerpts can be considered documentary excerpts. Documentary excerpts are best saved using Summary quotation type.