Outlining with Keywords and Categories

The longer you work with Citavi the more references and quotations you will have. To avoid getting lost in all of this information, you'll want to create some system so that you have an overview of everything and can easily find things.

One way to maintain order is to create projects for each topic. By doing this you can create a basic order that later will help with searching and selecting. It's also possible to collect and manage all information in one single project. Citavi makes it possible for you to create selections in a project (see Searching and Selecting) and to transfer information between projects (see Exporting to Another Citavi Project).

To use Citavi to the fullest, you can create meta-projects and projects for individual publications:

• You might create a project for an individual publication for a presentation, a dissertation, or a journal submission.
• In a meta project, which can be categorized by topic or uncategorized, you can add references and corresponding materials, without having to already have a concrete use case in mind.

In both types of projects you'll want to group references and knowledge items in a meaningful way. Citavi offers you Keywords and Categories to do just that.

• In a project for an individual publication, you'll use categories to structure and plan your work. Here categories are best used as the basis for an outline for your paper.  
• In meta-projects the categories may not be necessary since you don't need to create an outline for a specific paper. You can still use them, but they will likely be much more general. If you don't need to group topics together using a category system, you could even just use keywords in a meta-project.