Time Zones in Citavi

International teams often work in different time zones. Citavi 6.2 and later can now support time zones by saving changes to created and modified times in the database in UTC format. In the user interface, dates and times will continue to be displayed in the local time zone.

This feature only affects the following Citavi fields: Created on, Changed on, Task assigned on, Task completed on.

Example:

Urs and Jenny are working on a cloud project but in different locations. Urs is working in Bern (CEST time zone). He adds a journal article in Citavi. In the Created on field he sees the entry 2018-07-18 08:00. In the database, the date and time are saved as 2018-07-18 06:00 UTC. Jenny is working in Seattle (PDT time zone). Jenny sees that Urs added a new journal article. Citavi recalculates the time and displays the change in Jenny's time zone: 2018-07-17 23:00.

Correcting Time Zones

In Citavi 6.2 or later recognize if a Citavi project is using the UTC format for modification information. If Citavi sees that the old internal date format is being used, it will offer to correct the time zone. If you want to run the conversion later, you can find the command on the File menu. Click This project > Properties > General > Convert time zones (the button is only visible if the database isn't using UTC format already).

Even if you're not currently working with an international team, we recommend running the time zone correction.

Important:

The conversion has no effect on the dates and times in your bibliographies.
All other users of the project must be working with Citavi 6.2 or later.
Before you run the conversion, all other team members need to close the project.
After the conversion the project will be automatically closed and reopened.

Frequently asked questions

How does Citavi know which time zone you are working in?

Citavi pulls time zone information from the Windows system settings on your computer.

What happens if you convert time zones but your team members are still working with Citavi 6.0 or 6.1?

Users of previous Citavi versions will see incorrect dates. In the example above, if Jenny were working with Citavi 6.1, she would see the UTC time: 2018-07-18 06:00.