The RUVIVAL project works with the general scientific standard. We reference as all scientists do.

Within the framework of the RUVIVAL publication series, literature research on current topics related to sustainable rural development is collected, analysed and connected to the context of the topic. These are the result of cooperation between Master's students, doctoral students and research assistants at the Technical University of Hamburg. They deal with the rehabilitation of degraded areas and the creation of new spaces that are not only habitable but also worth living in. Each of the 6 published Journals is linked to further multimedia materials that can be found in the Lectures.

The project participants store the literature references of all sources used in all 6 publications in the literature management programme Citavi.

Citavi can manage text passages and images from documents as citations as well as texts and images representing the authors' own thoughts. These quotations and thoughts can be used as text modules in word processing, and the quotations are automatically assigned properly. Importing existing PDFs, documents, books and bibliographies into Citavi is easy, (almost) regardless of the format. For many sources, Citavi can automatically add the bibliographic information. This comprehensive programme also goes further than solely providing literature management, as it also served as a basis for discussing text structure and flexibly adapting outlines in the writing process, with the advantage that references, and research could already be linked to specific outline points.

Since Citavi has the disadvantage that even if this is scheduled, Mac IOS compatibility will not be available until 2021, the project increasingly turned to the far more compatible management programme Zotero. For this database, the Citavi database was taken as a basis, exported and then inserted into Zotero. This allows in future the reference data to be made generally accessible in the form of a link. With the free, open-source management programme Zotero, literature references can be clearly collected and reproduced, also searches can be organised, sorted and keyworded as desired. In addition, references and bibliographies can be easily created for any text editor and directly in Word, LibreOffice and Google Docs. With support for over 9,000 citation styles, work can be formatted to fit any style guide or publication.

Due to the project history described above, both programmes were used. This is also because a campus licence for Citavi is available at TUHH and the extensive functions promoted the writing process, even if the non-compatibility with IOS was a challenge.