APA 6th edition references capitalization issue

juhani_suhonen

Hello all.. I noticed Zotero does not fix capitalization for references according to APA 6th edition requirements (Chapter 4.15). Is this a software or a user bug :) ?

bwiernik

https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/sentence_casing

User bug ;). Store the items in your database in sentence casing.

Sheri

Well that sucks. When Chicago requires capitalization but APA doesn't, what are you supposed to do, have two different records of the same source??

fbennett

It doesn't suck so bad. One item stored with a sentence-case title covers both cases. Sentence-case storage is recommended (very strongly) because it is easy (in code) to capitalize the non-preposition terms in a title. Styles that need the title-case form will do that for you automatically. Converting the title in the other direction is (very) hard, because the system would need to leave all proper nouns in their capitalized form. That requires judgment, and can't be done in a purely mechanical way.

Sheri

OK, I did discover last night the ability to transform the title text and change it to sentence case. But what's weird to me is that I've had source records before be loaded into Zotero in sentence case from Amazon or Worldcat, but then those titles are definitely not capitalized in a doc set up in Chicago which requires it. Is there a separate place to indicate title case in the document settings?

adamsmith

No, that should work out of the box, we'd need an example to say more.

Sheri

OK, let me get back to you. I'll need to recreate that because I've been in the habit of "correcting" all my titles to Title Case since I primarily write following Chicago, but a recent article that required APA is what brought all of this up.

cuylerotsuka

Seconded. If the APA, 6th edition guidelines dictate sentence case for journal article titles, I would hope that Zotero would generate journal article titles in sentence case when I specify APA format.

dstillman

@cuylerotsuka: You're misunderstanding the problem. Read the explanation on the page linked by bwiernik above. There's no way for a computer to reliably convert title case to sentence case, because it can't know for sure what's a proper noun.

If you store titles as sentence case (which Zotero can help you do), Zotero will automatically use title case if the style calls for it. The opposite just isn't possible.

cuylerotsuka

@dstillman That being the case, RefWorks is able to reliably export citations with the first word capitalized and the first word after the colon capitalized; the only corrections I as the end-user have to make are to improper minuscule proper nouns, which are less frequent than improper majuscule words in title case.

dstillman

There's nothing reliable about that — that's creating ungrammatical, lowercased proper nouns. We could obviously do that too, but we feel that lowercased proper nouns are a far more egregious error than occasional title casing that many people won't notice or care about.

Again, the equivalent in Zotero is just right-clicking on the title in the right-hand pane and choosing "Sentence case", and then correcting the proper nouns. You only have to do that once, and then never again as long as the item is in your library (which presumably isn't the case in RefWorks if the lowercasing is applied at output time). But we're not going to mangle proper nouns as a default.

(In ZoteroBib, where you choose a single style to use at a time, we do convert all titles to sentence case and instruct you to fix proper nouns, but that doesn't really make sense in Zotero, where you're keeping items in a database for extended periods of time and potentially using them with various different styles.)

cuylerotsuka

@dstillman, I appreciate your opinion—in my situation, my program uses APA, 6th edition; capitalizing a few proper nouns is less of a hassle than lowercasing every single word *in my case*. Others may have different opinions because others have different situations.

I will try the fix you proposed just now. I hope it works. :)

cuylerotsuka

Re: "Again, the equivalent in Zotero is just right-clicking on the title in the right-hand pane and choosing "Sentence case", and then correcting the proper nouns. You only have to do that once, and then never again as long as the item is in your library."

This worked perfectly. Thank you!