APA7 style bug: capitalization of several subtitles

ben.meier
According to APA7, the first word of a subtitle should be capitalized (https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/capitalization/title-case). The CSL style does this for the first subtitle, but not for more than one subtitle.

This is my title: With a nice subtitle: but some authors just use more: and more: and more
  • dunning
    This is controlled by the citation processor (citeproc-js) rather than the APA style itself. For a second subtitle, one common choice is to punctuate with a period rather than a colon (e.g. 'Cirencester: town and landscape. An urban archaeological assessment').

    Alternatively you might be looking at a part or volume title, which can be added to the Extra field using the following form:

    volume: 3
    volume-title: Volume the third
    part-number: 2
    part-title: Part the second
  • ben.meier
    edited 3 days ago
    @dunning APA7 specifies that two subtitles should be separated by colons (each). The „Title Variations“ section on page 316 points to example 50 for this case. Example 50 in section 10.4 clearly separates multiple subtitles with colons each.

    According to section 6.17, the first word of a subtitle should be capitalized.

    Following zoteros advice, I
    (a) store all titles and subtitles in the title field and
    (b) use sentence case in the title field.


    My example above is stored as
    title = This is my title: with a nice subtitle: but some authors just use more: and more: and more
    I expect to get it referenced as
    This is my title: With a nice subtitle: But some authors just use more: And more: And more
    but only get
    This is my title: With a nice subtitle: but some authors just use more: and more: and more
  • bwiernik
    This isn't something that CSL or Zotero formally supports at this point. A feature allowing for multiple subtitles is part of a draft future version of CSL that might be released in some form in the future: https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/pull/323

    For now, given that multi-subtitle items are very rare, I would recommend storing them with the casing of subsequent subtitles formatted according to your most commonly used style (e.g, in uppercase if you typically use APA) and then manually adjusting item data or output on the occasions you use another style.
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