Zotero doesn't respect style rules for case of titles

cormanaz

APA style (7th Ed) requires titles of articles and books to be in sentence case. When Zotero creates a bibliography, it uses titles exactly as they were entered in the database. In my case that's a mix of title case and sentence case (depending on where it got the entry). I know other styles use title case, so I it's a problem for them too.

This makes for a lot of tedious editing when I am ready to submit a paper. Are there any plans to fix this?

adamsmith

https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/sentence_casing -- sentence case can't be automated (title case can).

cormanaz

Actually it can. Named entity recognizers can identify proper nouns. But maybe that's more processing than is practical on the Zotero app.

I didn't know it would go the other way, from sentence to title case. So I can just make sure things get stored in sentence case.

dstillman

Did you read the page?

Unfortunately, it's not possible for Zotero or any other tool to reliably automate conversion to sentence case, since a computer can't know for sure that something is a proper noun. (Think, for example, of the word “united”, which can be an adjective, verb, name of a company, or part of a country name.)

The key word is "reliably".

LLMs have come the closest to making this no longer true, but we've tested this in GPT-4o as recently as a few days ago, and it still makes mistakes (including weird things like messing up other punctuation in the titles).

cormanaz

Yes, I did read the page. It depends on what your requirements are for "reliably." If it could even do a partially correct job when the entry is created it would save a lot of editing. In fact, if you just converted everything to lower case except the first letter of the title and subtitle, I'd have much less work to do correcting a few entries that have proper nouns than changing almost every word in a title case string. (Only two of 27 title case titles in a collections I just checked had proper nouns. )

dstillman

I mean, it still doesn't sound like you read the page, since the page also explains how to convert to sentence case with two clicks. It takes literally a second. You don’t have to lowercase each word individually.

We’re not going to automatically create titles with uncapitalized proper nouns. People would end up with embarrassing mistakes all the time. If you're using APA, you click to convert once and fix proper nouns if there are any.

cormanaz

I did indeed miss that part and it's very helpful.

It could be improved by not lowering (1) the first char after a colon (i.e. subtitle) or (2) any combo of two or more upper chars, alternatively followed by a period (so matching regex /\b([A-Z]\.?){2,}\b/) to keep COVID, U.S., etc.

dstillman

Zotero 7 includes a better sentence-caser that will leave things like "COVID" and "U.S." alone.

The character after a colon needs to be lowercased because not all sentence-case styles capitalize the first word after a colon. This is, once again, covered on the linked page.

cormanaz

I see Zotero 7 is in beta. Is it stable? Also it says there is no Chrome connector. Are you planning one?

dstillman

From the beta builds page:

It's not necessary to use a beta version of the connector when using the Zotero Beta above.