“Dear fellow scholars”,
This is about Citavi. I know you guys are all Team Zotero but this is for the dozens of us:
I found a way to generate a complete directory of notes for each publication, filled with every citation you have made in Citavi. Im on the German UI so my translated directions can be hit or miss.
Citavi Part.
-
File->Print bibliography->Print with additional infos
-
Here, select only Short title and Citations, or whatever you like to fiddle around with.
-
Next, save the docx file and open it.
-
Open the style presets, and right click the citavi entry for the titles. You want to select all instances:
-
With all the titles selected, change them to Heading 1. Save.
-
Head over to https://word2md.com/ and let it run through.
Obsidian Part.
-
Download the plugin “Notes Refactor”. Configure it. This addon will break up each heading into a new page, making every publication we just switched to H1 to a seperate file.
-
Copy/Paste the data into a new Page.
-
CTRL-P, refactor split notes by Heading 1.
-
Watch the magic happen. It worked flawlessly with my over 300 publications, might take a bit though.
this way is more of a direction to poke around. There are many limitations which are really frustrating and makes it impossible for me to actually work with. For example:
-
It literally cannot be synced. If you did it again, you would get just another swoop of dozens of pages.
-
Citavi is a big dumb dumb regarding data exports. No categories or keywords connected to a citation are exported. You absoutely can include more info in step 2, but for whatever very frustrating reason, some data categories share the same styling with the header, making it very difficult for Note Refactor to parse the data in the next step.
Generating these pages can be done via the Zotero plugin as well, but this won’t export your citations - they cannot(?) be stored in a bitlatex format. However, these ones DO can be synced or updated, meaning all your publications would maintain a discrete file in Obsidian. I thought for a looong time it wasnt worth looking into the zotero plugins but as it turns out, there are quite a few ways of making it work with citavi as well.
As I said earlier, I dont believe this is actually that practical, but perhaps enough of a pointer for folks that are using citavi and Zotero kida won’t be an option.