Unwanted automatic capitalisation

zurpher

When I import reference, for example from the British Library, the titles usually get capitalised. Why?

I want to use APA style and it is not helpful having to remove capitals before I actually can use it for citations.

Thanks for your help.

adamsmith

not much you can do - it depends on the translator and the data provided by the respective site, but most catalogues do indeed lead to title-case imports.

zurpher

I wonder how it comes that a title who is not displayed with title-cases becomes a title-case import. As layperson I would assume that its zotero's translator. Could that be changed?

In using APA style could I change the style settings to de-capitalise titles?

Thanks for attending to this.

dstillman

extensions.zotero.capitalizeTitles

http://www.zotero.org/support/hidden_prefs

adamsmith

edit - [deleted]never mind that part then.

The problem with de-capitalizing in the style is that Zotero (or any software for that matter) cannot properly deal with proper names - there is an option to transform to sentence case, but that would do thinks like:
The age of reagan
The life of thomas morus
etc., which is why it's not coded in the APA style.
If you right-click on the title after import you can transform it to lowercase and then capitalize whatever needs to be - right now that's your best bet.

adamsmith

Dan - since we generally recommend people to use sentence case in saving data, shouldn't that option default to false?

dstillman

It's there because many resources serve data in all-caps.

However, we could perhaps change the behavior or add an option to apply that only to all-caps data.

adamsmith

I see, that makes sense - much better than all caps -
but yes, if this could be changed with a reasonable amount of work I think maintaining sentence case (i.e. only applying this to all caps entries) would be great.

zurpher

Thanks Dan,

I just de-activated the function you pointed me to.

"If you right-click on the title after import you can transform it to lowercase and then capitalize whatever needs to be - right now that's your best bet."

Thanks adamsmith, that will save me time when I actually have to use the hundreds of references I already saved to zotero in the capitalised style.

I wish I would have asked for your advice earlier.