Adding Thoughts

The Thoughts feature lets you save and manage ideas, comments, and explanations about any reference, topic, or project you are working on. By assigning categories to thoughts, you can create a web of relationships that can help you structure your ideas and arguments. We recommend saving your thoughts in the Knowledge Organizer.

If you have assigned a category to a quotation, you can place a thought directly after it in the list of quotations. If a quotation or group of quotations does not have any categories assigned to it, the thoughts will be added to the "No categories" list and will be sorted alphabetically by core statement. Please note that these uncategorized thoughts and quotations cannot be sorted.

Please also read the notes on the Evaluation and Notes fields.

Adding a Text Thought

  1. In the Reference Editor or Knowledge Organizer, click Thought in the toolbar, or press Ctrl+I.
  2. In the Core Statement field, enter a concise formulation of the main idea of the thought.
  3. Enter the thought in more detail in the Text field.
  4. Enter Keywords if desired.
  5. In the Categories field, assign one or more categories that help establish relationships with other quotations or thoughts.
  6. If you want, assign your thought to one or more Groups.

The Modified field will automatically update with your initials and the date.

Adding an Image or File Thought

Perhaps you photographed an image on a slide during a presentation. Or you created a draft outline that you then scanned into your computer. You can add these image files as thoughts as well.

  1. In the Reference Editor or in the Knowledge Organizer, click the arrow next to Thought in the toolbar and then click Image or file.
  2. Enter a short description in the Caption field.
  3. Click Add file. Locate the file on your computer. Citavi will insert the file location in the Path field. Click Browse.
  4. Complete the rest of the fields. Enter a detailedDescription for your own use.
  5. Enter Keywords if desired.
  6. In the Categories field, assign one or more categories that help establish relationships with other quotations or thoughts.
  7. If you want, assign your thought to one or more Groups.

Double-click the preview image to open the original file in the default program. To delete the image, click to select it and then on the Edit menu, click Delete.

Copying a Thought to Another Project

  1. Switch to the Knowledge Organizer and select one or more thoughts. (To select multiple thoughts, hold the Ctrl key and click each thought.)
  2. Press Ctrl+C.
  3. Open the project you want to add the thought to and switch to the Knowledge Organizer.
  4. Press Ctrl+V to insert the thought.