Import from Citavi

2shades · February 7, 2023

Hi,
I just tried importing a local project from Citavi 6 following this excellent description here: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/import_from_citavi. Unfortunately, no items get imported into my Zotero 6 library by using the described method. An RIS import of the same items would work, but I would prefer the more complete records.
Does anyone have any advice on this?
Thanks!

tnajdek · February 8, 2023

Generally the import should work, it's quite easy to select wrong file for the import, so please double check if you've followed all the steps on the linked page and picked correct .ctv6 file.

If that doesn't help, try running import again with debug enabled, we might be able to say more.

2shades · February 8, 2023

Hi tnajdek,
Thank you very much for the swift reply! I enabled the debug and sent a report with ID D438768934.
Thank you for troubleshooting the issue for me!

tnajdek · February 8, 2023

This output suggest you've picked a wrong file.

It looks like you've picked a Citavi DB file from Documents\Citavi 6\Projects, however the instruction asks you to create a "backup" file using Citavi, which is a zip file normally created in Documents\Citavi 6\Backup and needs to be extracted before importing.

2shades · February 9, 2023

Hi,
I had also created a backup file. I had just not understood the instruction insofar as to use this file. Unfortunately, the backup file is no zip file in my case (or does not resemble one). I have send another debug report with ID D63404557. I am a bit puzzled as to what went wrong here. Thanks for shedding light on this for me.

tnajdek · February 9, 2023

The instruction does mention that the backup file is a zip file but it does not have a .zip extension. One way to deal with this is to configure Windows Explorer to display file extensions (if you google this, there are many results showing how to do this) and then rename the file so that it ends with .zip instead of .ctv6bak. Once you do this, it should be possible to unzip the file using Windows Explorer. The extracted file will have .ctv6 extension and can be imported by Zotero.

Also if you have any attachments (like PDFs) in your Citavi, please make sure you follow the next step of the instruction (step 4) before importing, otherwise these files (and any annotations) won't be imported correctly.