Updates and migration from zotero

[kmcquade]

System information: [ Citavi Version 3.4, Windows XP, English, Other browser, MS Office 2010 32Bit, Acrobat XI ]

I have two questions. First, I'm interested in purchasing citavi. If I purchase now, can I update to version 4 without additional payment?

Also, I have tried to transfer libraries exported from zotero. All the information seems to be present except that the journal title fields are not populated. I've exported in RIS and bibtex formats. Might you provide suggestions as to how to fix this problem?

Thank you.

[Patrick Hilt]

Hello,

There will be a grace period before the release of Citavi 4, but we have not decided yet when that is going to start.

This is the field definition from the RIS documentation for journal article:



I introduced the RIS field names into the corresponding fields in zotero, exported them in the ris format, and imported them into Citavi. It seems that nearly all fields are exported (Keywords and Abstract are exported onto different tabs):


This is how the journal appears in the periodicals list:


As to your problem:
Could you send me a screenshot of a title in zotero and your ris export file so I can check what goes wrong? You can send them to us via http://www.citavi.com/transfer.

Best regards
Patrick

[kmcquade]

I've repeated this with slightly different results. All entries were copied over three times. One entry had no journal information but the other two did. The library was small enough that I could fairly easily delete entries lacking this information. I have no other libraries to transfer over, so I think this problem is over for me. I'd be happy to still send my export file if it is useful to you.

[Patrick Hilt]

Hello,
yes, we would be glad to have your file so we can test it ourselves.
Did I understand you correctly that sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't? That would be something we'd have to investigate.

Best regards
Patrick

[kmcquade]

I have tried this twice. The first time, I think that journal title cells were never populated. The second resulted in the duplication of records described in my most recent post. I will forward that export file to you soon.

Thanks for your quick response.

[ajryounger]

This is less a reply than a brief note on another set of problems migrating from Zotero.

My test involved exporting a moderately sized library (750 items) from Zotero and importing to Citavi 3.
I ended up with a lot of journal articles, apparently with correct information filled in, and carrying "jstor stable" URLs. The next test step was to see if Citavi would collect the appropriate pdfs.

The short answer is: No. That is after 3 full days of working on it and consulting with Jennifer. Zotero itself will, of course, do this seamlessly.

Yet, strangely and inexplicably, it did work correctly ... one single time. I thought I had found the Higgs boson.
But the next morning it was gone.

A critical part of the problem seems to be that Citavi does not use my openURL resolver to collect the fulltext pdf ... only to check availability. It has become a very long story. It seems to me that this is an obvious test.

No mater how enjoyable the interface (and that is one attraction of Citavi), the inability to conduct full text searches easily and effectively is a fatal flaw.

I have spent time on the phone with my university library. I'm off to test Papers.

ay

[Jennifer Schultz]

Hello,

Thanks so much for your note! I'm sorry the migration was so frustrating for you. For whatever reason, many of the DOI names provided by JSTOR are faulty and cannot be found in the CrossRef.org database (at least for the JSTOR articles we looked at yesterday during our chat conversation). Citavi uses the DOI name to look for full text articles, so this has to be accurate or the full text cannot be found. For this reason, even though you had the JSTOR stable URLs, Citavi's Find full text feature could not locate the articles. For the references we looked at together, the one time the download did work for a JSTOR article, the DOI name was correct and could be found in CrossRef.org. The problem that we looked at regarding the full text of an Elsevier article not being found has been corrected for the next beta version.

Zotero searches for full text using the reference's bibliographic information, so it can still find full text if the DOI name is missing or incorrect. We agree that this should be possible to do in Citavi as well, and improving Citavi's ability to find full text using other information besides the DOI name is near the top of our development priorities list.

It's probably not much of a reassurance at this point, but most of the time our Find full text feature does work quite well. Problems occur when DOI names either aren't available or are not accurate, which is fortunately not the case most of the time for articles published within the last ten years.

Thanks very much for sharing your experiences with us and helping us to make Citavi a better program in the future!

Best regards,
Jennifer