Sentence casing

apbaer

I need to set my citations to sentence casing for APA citation. I have found references to sentence casing in the forums but am having trouble figuring out how to make this setting change. Are there explicit instructions on this somewhere? Thanks!

apbaer

Actually, I just figured out that I need to right click on the title of an item within its full record. Is it possible to do this in batches, or does each one need to be done separately?

DWL-SDCA

Be sure that _all_ of your Zotero records have titles in "sentence case" not "title case" so that Zotero styles can work their magic. Zotero can convert sentence case to title case but not title case to sentence. No reference manager can do that.

DWL-SDCA

Not possible to do this in batches. You will need to use upper case for proper nouns.

Do convert title case titles to sentence case by the right-click method.

adamsmith

I think doing this in batches would be nice, even if it requires later touch-ups, but we don't have those for anything other than tags in Zotero at this time, unfortunately.

You also currently need to uppercase the first letter after a colon for APA style (long story, that one).

apbaer

Thanks, so it sounds like there are no universal setting in the Preferences for sentence case, and like I will need to make this change each time I add a citation. Is that correct?

DWL-SDCA

Is that correct? You only need to edit the record one time and do that edit one time in Zotero not in your manuscript.

Don't confuse title format for the Zotero record and the format for what Zotero places in your document. You need the Zotero record to be in sentence case so that when cited Zotero can properly format your titles. Sentence case in Zotero records will automatically be converted to the correct title case for the style you use.

DWL-SDCA

Sebastian, does the APA style not automatically convert a lower case letter after a colon to upper case? I thought that was the final resolution. No need to revisit that thorny discussion.

adamsmith

DWL -- there's a special plugin by Frank that does this. The style doesn't currently. I'd like it to, but that requires a CSL change.

@apbaer -- if by "add a citation" you mean adding it to Zotero, then that's correct, yes. Note that Zotero imports in sentence case wherever possible (e.g. from all library catalogs and some article databases such as pubmed and large parts of google scholar). Unfortunately, many publishers provide citation data in title case because that's how they display it.

apbaer

Ok, thanks!

bwiernik

For the after-colon capitalization in APA, I would recommend storing the titles in full sentence case (not capitalized), then installing the Propachi Uppercase Subtitles plugin (https://juris-m.github.io/downloads/#csl-stuff), which will handle the capitalization. This will be the least amount of work for you.

araefielding

Greetings,

I've downloaded the Propachi Uppercase Subtitle plugin, but after testing it does not appear to be functioning properly. I'm running Zotero for Firefox, Ver. 4.0.29.10 and the version of Propachi is 1.1.46.

I've confirmed that the plug-in is installed/enabled in the Add-ons manager of Firefox. When I put a title into sentence case in my Zotero library and then generate the citation in Word, the first letter of the subtitle remains lower case. Have I missed some basic function to enable the plug-in to function properly?

bwiernik

The plugin determines the title/subtitle based on the Short Title field. You need to have the exact same text in the Short Title field and the Title field (up until the colon) for it to recognize the subtitle.

araefielding

That did the trick! Thanks for the speedy response!

ClaireRichards

It seems like now it's automatically making the subtitle capitalized (pulls hair out). All my titles are lower case in zotero and using AMA format, the works after colon are coming out capitalized.

fbennett

It does look like AMA should not be capitalizing there:

https://amastyleinsider.com/2016/06/09/questions-from-users-of-the-manual-44/
https://www.amamanualofstyle.com/view/10.1093/jama/9780195176339.001.0001/med-9780195176339-div1-41

ClaireRichards

Exactly my point, and it's driving me nuts because I can't figure out how to undo it. My actual zotero references are all sentence case but this is happening anyway now (apparently).

fbennett

This is caused by a recent change in Zotero. There isn't a simple way to control it locally, you will need to wait for the developers to pick this up. They read all posts here, and will respond on their next visit to the forums.

dstillman

Here's the official site (paywalled):

Style for subtitles follows that for titles (see 3.9, Titles) for spelling, abbreviations, numbers, capitalization, and use of italics, except that for journal articles the subtitle begins with a lowercase letter.

I'm not sure if that means that the subtitles of item types other than journal articles should be capitalized, but regardless, I've removed subtitle capitalization for AMA (added in 5.0.70) in the latest Zotero beta, which should be available in a few minutes — look for 5.0.73-beta.4. You can install that to fix this now and switch back to the release version when 5.0.73 is released, which should be in the next couple days.

bwiernik

I looked into it—AMA uses “journal article” to refer to the title of any item that is part of a container (which are formatted in sentence case with lowercase subtitles). For example, for chapters, they say “format titles like a journal article”. Perusing some papers in JAMA, this looks like the rule they follow.

dstillman

@ClaireRichards: Zotero 5.0.73 is available now with this fix.