CTV3 Converter

Extract text from Citavi 3 project files (CTV3)


Drop or upload your .CTV3 file
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How to extract text from your CTV3 file

  1. Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your CTV3 file.
  2. You’ll see a preview, if available.
  3. Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.

Convert CTV3 to another file type

To convert CTV3 projects to another format, you need Citavi or other Database software.

Convert a file to CTV3

To convert other file formats to the "Reference Management File" file type, you need software like Citavi or a similar tool.


About CTV3 files

A .ctv3 file is a legacy project database created by Citavi 3, a reference management program used by academics to organize citations. Researchers rely on these files to store bibliographic metadata, quotations, abstracts, and internal links to local PDF documents. The software was originally developed by Swiss Academic Software. The core disadvantage of the .ctv3 format is its proprietary, closed nature. It traps your research data inside a specific, outdated version of a Windows-only software application. You cannot open these files in standard text editors or web browsers. Furthermore, standard online converters routinely fail to process them because a .ctv3 file is actually a relational database structure, not a traditional text document. To future-proof your research, you should convert this data to universally accepted bibliographic formats like RIS or BIB (BibTeX). This file format is exceedingly difficult to open or convert with generic tools. Often, only the original Citavi software can properly read the relational data or export the bibliography correctly. Because .ctv3 files use a hidden SQLite architecture, our analysis may detect this supported underlying embedded format, meaning viewing or partial conversion of raw text may still be possible.

Convert.Guru analyzes your CTV3 file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.


FAQ

If you want to convert CTV3 file to , you can use Citavi or similar software from the "Reference Management Data Storage" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….

To convert files to CTV3, try Citavi or another comparable tool in the "Reference Management Data Storage" category.



The CTV3 Converter Story

The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our CTV3 converter.