I would disagree with that. There should be one, single correct way to enter data into Zotero that produces correct citations in all citation styles and we should nudge people towards using that.
It's unfortunate that we spotted this issue late and didn't work on a proper solution earlier, but it doesn't seem far-fetched that, say, clinical psychologists would jump between Vancouver and APA style.
You can't disagree with a wish - it's personal :). However, I certainly see your logic about the standard of using sentence case to enter data and then using plugins for individual style preferences. I'm just happy there's now a plugin available to deal with a vexing problem that apparently has been plaguing many users. So thanks to Frank and the rest of you for your quick responses and timely solutions.
First, sometimes an en dash or em dash are used to separate the title and subtitle, rather than a colon. Could the processor be adjusted to also accept these as valid separators (with or without spaces before the dash)? (e.g., http://apm.sagepub.com/content/1/1/1)
Second, for book sections, the 'Short Title' field refers to the title of the chapter, not the book itself. To get a capitalized subtitle for the book, you need to store the metadata with the capital letter. I'm not sure if this can be fixed in the processor without a 'Book Short Title' field to denote the main title of the book, but it might be something to look into when this functionality is incorporated into CSL proper.
Em-dash and en-dash should be no problem, since we're taking a clue from the value of the Zotero-side short-title field.
Good point over book titles. We have container-title-short in the CSL schema, so that's covered as far as style validation and the processor are concerned. As you say, though, we'll need a field in the item metadata on Zotero-side, to provide the container-title-short hint.
I can make the adjustments in the processor to prepare the way.
Thunnissen, M., Boselie, P., & Fruytier, B. (2013). A review of talent management: “infancy or adolescence?.” The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 24(9), 1744–1761. doi:10.1080/09585192.2013.777543
The processor should probably ignore punctuation when capitalizing the first letter of the subtitle
agreed. I'm concerned about that period after the question mark. I thought we fixed that. (You agree that's incorrect, right? It's definitely wrong if this were Chicago style)
Yeah, it's wrong, and we did fix that. Frank hasn't had a chance to update the capitalization gadget to the newer version of the processor. I forgot to delete it when copying the reference here.
I think I have a fix in place for the quote bug, but I didn't have time to test before leaving the house. The approach will be to step through the subtitle string and capitalize the first character that shows a difference in upper- and lower-case forms, which should solve this one generally.
The single quotes are also outputting as double quotes, so that might be the issue here? (Switching the quotes to double quotes don't change the failure to capitalize).
Well, that's weird. The fix I applied seems to have gone missing from the repo. Thanks for checking, sorry about the hassle with the missing toggle. I'll try again, probably tomorrow.
Is there any chance you could add an about:config preference to the processor gadget to switch the Uppercase Subtitle preferences so that they don't need to be edited in the .xpi manually (and you don't have to bother updating the special uppercase gadget separately)?
This is a question related to the issue of separating title and subtitle when only a single title field is available:
I wonder whether adopting the convention of separating title and subtitle by space-colon-space has ever been considered for Zotero, or even for CSL in general.
Example: Title: “The Chicago manual of style : for authors, editors and copywriters”
This seems to be
widely used in library catalogs and standards; see, e.g.,
permit separation of title and subtitle in other title fields (where no short title field is available), too, e.g. book title, series title, and the proposed volume title.
Given the current data model, we've mainly been removing those spaces before the colon. One concern would be that Zotero's philosophy has always tended against mark-up in fields (the html for rich text is a workaround awaiting a real solution) and in practice that's what this is since outside of cataloging, no one actually wants to see that space.
I don't have a particularly strong opinion about this at this point, except that I do think dealing with subtitles properly should be one of the formatting improvement priorities for CSL/Zotero (I have, in the mean time, found a fourth form of capitalization in titles, btw., I'll call it "British title case," which is like regular title case, but the first word of the subtitle isn't automatically capitalized, ie. "Golden Fetters: the Gold Standard and the Economy")
That example item still isn't rendering correctly for me. Using the current version of the uppercase subtitle gadget (updated 2015-01-12, version 1.0.3, with processor version 1.0.549), using the APA 6th edition style, it still renders as:
Thunnissen, M., Boselie, P., & Fruytier, B. (2013). A review of talent management: “infancy or adolescence?” The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 24(9), 1744–1761. doi:10.1080/09585192.2013.777543
The processor is (1) not capitalizing infancy and (2) changing the single quotes to double quotes.
I don't really have a preference one way or the other regarding the quotes. The item is originally printed with single quotes in the journal, but I have seen citations to this item printed in both formats.
When the plugin is installed and enabled, it will uppercase the first character of the subtitle (the portion of the title after the first colon) if and only if the Short Title field exactly matches the main title (the portion before the first colon).
Dear Frank,
Thanks for your great effort with the plugin.
I just want to hint at a problem:
Often when I import article, they come with title capitalization. I then change it manually to sentence capitalization. However, the Short Title is left with title capitalization. As a result, your fix doesn't work. I would have to change Title and Short Title to sentence capitalization which is actually a bit cumbersome.
Perhaps there are other more suitable solutions at the horizon. I hope so.
Are there any reasons why this shouldn't be implemented?
###
Another option would be to add a third option in Zotero altogether that would allow to generate Title and Subtitle capitalization.
I think it would be best to be able to solve the capitalization issue on a per style basis. I guess the issue would be with words that require capitalization such as Europe etc.
Upgrade Storage
It's unfortunate that we spotted this issue late and didn't work on a proper solution earlier, but it doesn't seem far-fetched that, say, clinical psychologists would jump between Vancouver and APA style.
First, sometimes an en dash or em dash are used to separate the title and subtitle, rather than a colon. Could the processor be adjusted to also accept these as valid separators (with or without spaces before the dash)?
(e.g., http://apm.sagepub.com/content/1/1/1)
Second, for book sections, the 'Short Title' field refers to the title of the chapter, not the book itself. To get a capitalized subtitle for the book, you need to store the metadata with the capital letter. I'm not sure if this can be fixed in the processor without a 'Book Short Title' field to denote the main title of the book, but it might be something to look into when this functionality is incorporated into CSL proper.
Good point over book titles. We have container-title-short in the CSL schema, so that's covered as far as style validation and the processor are concerned. As you say, though, we'll need a field in the item metadata on Zotero-side, to provide the container-title-short hint.
I can make the adjustments in the processor to prepare the way.
Thunnissen, M., Boselie, P., & Fruytier, B. (2013). A review of talent management: “infancy or adolescence?.” The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 24(9), 1744–1761. doi:10.1080/09585192.2013.777543
The processor should probably ignore punctuation when capitalizing the first letter of the subtitle
Happy holidays etc. etc.
Not working for the above reference.
(BibTex https://gist.github.com/9a4d97bb3aa0e70f9496.git)
The single quotes are also outputting as double quotes, so that might be the issue here? (Switching the quotes to double quotes don't change the failure to capitalize).
Is there any chance you could add an about:config preference to the processor gadget to switch the Uppercase Subtitle preferences so that they don't need to be edited in the .xpi manually (and you don't have to bother updating the special uppercase gadget separately)?
The gist with the bad ref seems to have expired. Could you put it up again? (and sorry for the delay - bears repeating).
I wonder whether adopting the convention of separating title and subtitle
by space-colon-space has ever been considered for Zotero, or even for CSL in general.
Example:
Title: “The Chicago manual of style : for authors, editors and copywriters”
This seems to be
- widely used in library catalogs and standards; see, e.g.,
- British Library: http://catalogue.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=moreTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=BLL01007364974
- Library of Congress: http://lccn.loc.gov/82002832
- International Standard Bibliographic Description: http://www.ifla.org/files/assets/cataloguing/isbd/isbd-cons_20110321.pdf: “Each unit of other title information is preceded by a space, colon, space”
- Dublin Core: http://ntl.bts.gov/dublincore/ntl_dc_desc.html: “Separate title proper from subtitle(s) with space colon space”
- if adopted in Zotero, it would
- unambiguously separate title and subtitle,
- not interfere with any “normal” use of the colon,
- be relatively unobtrusive in the user interface,
- be backwards compatible,
- permit separation of title and subtitle in other title fields (where no short title field is available), too, e.g. book title, series title, and the proposed volume title.
Thoughts?One concern would be that Zotero's philosophy has always tended against mark-up in fields (the html for rich text is a workaround awaiting a real solution) and in practice that's what this is since outside of cataloging, no one actually wants to see that space.
I don't have a particularly strong opinion about this at this point, except that I do think dealing with subtitles properly should be one of the formatting improvement priorities for CSL/Zotero (I have, in the mean time, found a fourth form of capitalization in titles, btw., I'll call it "British title case," which is like regular title case, but the first word of the subtitle isn't automatically capitalized, ie. "Golden Fetters: the Gold Standard and the Economy")
Thunnissen, M., Boselie, P., & Fruytier, B. (2013). A review of talent management: “infancy or adolescence?” The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 24(9), 1744–1761. doi:10.1080/09585192.2013.777543
The processor is (1) not capitalizing infancy and (2) changing the single quotes to double quotes.
@nickbart -- maybe start a separate thread on this; looks like it's going to become too messy here.
Thanks for your great effort with the plugin.
I just want to hint at a problem:
Often when I import article, they come with title capitalization. I then change it manually to sentence capitalization. However, the Short Title is left with title capitalization. As a result, your fix doesn't work. I would have to change Title and Short Title to sentence capitalization which is actually a bit cumbersome.
Perhaps there are other more suitable solutions at the horizon. I hope so.
Keep up the good work! =)
Are there any reasons why this shouldn't be implemented?
###
Another option would be to add a third option in Zotero altogether that would allow to generate Title and Subtitle capitalization.
I think it would be best to be able to solve the capitalization issue on a per style basis. I guess the issue would be with words that require capitalization such as Europe etc.