This remarkable program merits its own thread. I use it as a knowledge manager; its capabilities as a reference and citation manager are, for the moment, secondary.

Citavi's key capability for me is the ease of previewing multiple semi-random items simultaneously while editing. It uses a three-pane model. The tree is reserved for categories; items, as single-line core statements, take a second pane; selected previews stack up and scroll in a third. This design facilitates unlimited cross-referencing without the tangle of recursivity.

Citavi would benefit from better user options for font size and background color, and a more compact and floatable Thought editor. And some way to add to the spell-check dictionary. Importing is also a weak spot. I haven't been getting much traction in Citavi's own English-language forum, so I hope some folks here will participate there as well to help achieve a critical mass of expert interactive feedback.

Power user tip: Items within a category appear in their pane in user-set order, with optional subheadings to break them out, a terrific feature. They can't be automatically sorted, far as I can tell, but they appear alphabetically in the Publication Assistant (on the Citation Menu or F7). From there, you can select and assign them to additional categories, thereby initially alphabetizing them in those categories.

Citavi is a desktop program that is free-of-charge for up to 100 *references* per project or session. That places no obvious limit on the knowledge items, URLs, or file links and previews in the free edition. The developer's Partners, such as academic database firms, help pick up the tab; use of Citavi no doubt boosts the activity billable to their subscribers.

Highly recommended.

Jerome

JJSlote wrote:

It uses a three-pane model. The tree is reserved
for categories; items, as single-line core statements, take a second pane; selected
previews stack up and scroll in a third.

I would note that this 3-pane approach is in my view the most effective when organising large numbers of items, where the tree navigator of more 'traditional' 2-pane outliners quickly becomes overcrowded.

I find it curious that this design is used so rarely in the tools discussed here, when considering that it is standard in e-mail clients. As far as I remember, apart for Citavi, I have only seen it in Normfall Manager, Sycon IDEA! (both German products like Citavi) and Zoot.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

I would note that this 3-pane approach is in my view the
most effective when organising large numbers of items, where the tree navigator of
more 'traditional' 2-pane outliners quickly becomes overcrowded.

I find it
curious that this design is used so rarely in the tools discussed here, when
considering that it is standard in e-mail clients. As far as I remember, apart for
Citavi, I have only seen it in Normfall Manager, Sycon IDEA! (both German products
like Citavi) and Zoot.

In InfoQube, the Properties pane can be used as a third pane, making it a 3 pane outliner...

Cheers !

Pierre Paul Landry wrote:

In InfoQube, the Properties pane can be used as a third
pane, making it a 3 pane outliner...

I think it's a different concept. Other outliners, such as UltraRecall can also display additional panes, such as properties or notes, but this doesn't necessarily help in uncluttering the tree.

The approach implemented by the programs I mentioned follows the principles below:

1st pane: hierarchical outline/tree, categories only, no individual info items
2nd pane: list view of items
3rd pane: details of the selected item

In InfoQube, as far as I understand, the outline includes the info items.

In UltraRecall (funny I hadn't thought of this before), it is actually possible to use the Child Items pane as the 2nd pane above and navigate through the items there. This doesn't literally unclutter the tree, as the individual info items are still there; however, one can maintain the parent folders unexpanded, which provides the same uncluttered view in practice.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

As far as I remember, apart for
Citavi, I have only seen it in Normfall Manager, Sycon IDEA! (both German products
like Citavi) and Zoot.

Evernote also has a similar concept, but loses on the first pane where only a flat list of notebooks is available, i.e. no structure. New releases promise 'stacks' of notebooks http://blog.evernote.com/2010/12/15/evernote-2-0-for-mac-is-now-available/ but this only provides one additional level of organisation.

To the extent that categories are analogous to tags, Evernote does exactly what Citavi does, if I'm understanding it right:

- tags on the leftmost pane
- a list of individual items belonging to the selected tag appear in the middle pane
- the content of the individual item appears in the right pane. (and can be viewed in a separate window, allowing the contents ofmultiple notes to be viewed at once)

dan7000 wrote:

To the extent that categories are analogous to tags, Evernote does exactly what
Citavi does, if I'm understanding it right:

You are perfectly right; my bad. The irony of it is that I have written elsewhere in this forum about the power of Evernote's hierarchical tagging.

dan7000 wrote:

Evernote does exactly what Citavi does, if I'm understanding it right:
- the content of the individual item appears in the right pane. (and can be viewed in a
separate window, allowing the contents ofmultiple notes to be viewed at once)

The Citavi third pane displays not the single item, but stacked up, scrolling previews of whichever items you multiselect in the second pane. You can access an additional pane of previews in the floatable Publication Assistant. You'd edit any items you choose in separate windows, as you would in Evernote. But it's usually easier to edit just the one note you want and use the preview panes to stack up the supporting material. Grouped scrolling previews mean less commitment to each supporting note, hence more spontaneous thought exploration with much less window wrangling.

But the Citavi editor needs to be more compact. And oddly, only the floating Publication Assistant preview pane enables text selection within a previewed knowledge item; the inline preview pane does not. I've requested both enhancements.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

The approach implemented by the programs I mentioned follows the principles below:

1st pane: hierarchical outline/tree, categories only, no individual info
items
2nd pane: list view of items
3rd pane: details of the selected item

Well, in IQ,
- your 1st pane would be the Properties Pane, which can display list of fields (categories) in flat or hierarchy view. In addition, it contains forms which acts as groups of categories, where a subset of the categories can be shown and ordered.
- your second pane is the grid, which would contain the list of info items. You can choose to display a flat list or add some structure to your items.
- your third pane is the HTML pane, details of the selected item

FYI
(I don't want to hog this thread...)

@ JJSlote

The Citavi third pane displays not the single item, but stacked up, scrolling
previews of whichever items you multiselect in the second pane.

This is indeed useful. I've only seen this before in RSS readers (including Mozilla Thunderbird which also does email)


@ PPL
Thanks for the clarification. I find that I have become quite lazy when evaluating software and miss out on some important details. The ability to rearrange panes and their contents in modern programs is still a sort of cultural shock for me...

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

This is indeed useful. I've only seen this before in RSS readers (including Mozilla
Thunderbird which also does email)

Yep, similar idea. But Thunderbird's stackable preview pane is an item locator; it displays about 300 characters per entry. Citavi displays its internal knowledge items at full formatted length, and PDFs, URLs, TXT and image files in a zoomable compact view. (DOCs and RTFs also preview in the stacked pane, but require a click, for no obvious reason.)