APA Book Chapter: Book subtitles need to be upper case too.

zurpher

In APA 6, the first letter of a subtitle needs to be upper case. The Propachi-monkey patch does the job for journal articles. However, what about book chapters where not only the first letter of the chapter subtitle needs to be upper case but also the book subtitle too

Here is an example of my current output:

Flick, U. (2000). Episodic interviewing. In M. W. Bauer & G. Gaskell (Eds.), Qualitative researching with text, image and sound: a practical handbook (pp. 75–92). London: Sage.

It should look instead like the following.

Flick, U. (2000). Episodic interviewing. In M. W. Bauer & G. Gaskell (Eds.), Qualitative researching with text, image and sound: A practical handbook (pp. 75–92). London: Sage.

adamsmith

cc @fbennett

bwiernik

If you have the Propachi plugin installed with the Uppercase subtitles option enabled, you can get the book subtitle in uppercase by adding the short title to Extra:
container-title-short: Part before the colon

bwiernik

(Obviously, this would be much easier if Zotero had a direct way to indicate the title and subtitle in one field, rather than Citeproc-js needing to infer the subtitle from the difference between Title and Short Title.)

zurpher

Thanks! So, I would have to through all my book chapter items and modify the Extra field? This seems quite cumbersome. Is there no better solution? For example, somehow automatically capitalizing the first letter after the colon in the Book Title field?

bwiernik

No, Propachi works by detecting the subtitle based on the difference between the Title field and the Short Title field containing only the parts that come before the colon. I believe that @fbennett's logic here was that simply capitalizing after all colons would be too prone to errors.

zurpher

@bwiernik When I use the Item Type "Book Section" then I only have the field "Book Title" available. There is no field for the "Book Sub-Title" in that case. So, basically there is no other option then to manually change all book title fields to APA format or add container-title-short: Part before the colon to Extra but will I loose, for example chapter DOIs, in such a scenario? Is there perhaps a more sophisticated hack that could help with this? I know that there are some advanced methods to manipulate the database.

bwiernik

You could use PyZotero in Python to find all the bookSection items, then set Extra equal to 'container-title-short: [regex for part of bookTitle before the colon]' + '\n' + [existing Extra content]

zurpher

Great. It seems a bit techy. I will give it a try when my need becomes more urgent.

In the past I used Execute JS to manipulate the database but it is not compatible with the current Firefox Quantum ESR 60.

bwiernik

More importantly, Execute JS doesn’t work in the standalone Zotero app. Currently, the only access to the JavaScript API (like Execute JS used) is PyZotero.

zurpher

@bwiernik I reckon I can use the Extra field only for one function – either book chapter DOI oder container-title-short. What can I do about book chapters that require both?

Example:

Smith, R. (2006). Technical difficulties: The workings of practical judgement. In P. Smeyers & M. Depaepe (Eds.), Educational research: Why ‘what works’ doesn’t work (pp. 159–170). Dordrecht: Springer. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5308-5_10

bwiernik

You can put multiple pieces on information on new lines in Extra.

zurpher

Currently, in my manuscript – with APA 6 selected – all my English subtitles are not sentence capitalised. Why? I have added the title of my book entries to the "Short Title" field. So, this is not the problem. Any ideas?

Another weird problem is that now the field "Archive" and "Loc. in Archive" are displayed. I have used these field to record library information and do not want them to appear in the bibliography.

adamsmith

Not much we can do about the Archive/Loc Archive fields -- these aren't intended for custom information and we do need them for full APA support.

How are the subtitles appearing in APA? Do you have the propachi tool installed (remember, Zotero doesn't automatically capitalize subtitles)

zurpher

But why are the Archive/Loc Archive fields displayed when it comes to books? I don't recall this has been the case in the past? What about Library Catalog and Call Number then? Can I also not use these fields any more?

I actually do not have the propachi tool installed at my current computer. Didn't think of that. Thanks for pointing this out. Should I use the following version?

https://github.com/Juris-M/propachi-vanilla/releases/download/v1.1.146/propachi-vanilla-v1.1.146.xpi

fbennett

I think that's the latest, yes. You may find that with this version you no longer need to set the main title as subtitle to get it to do the capitalization.

bwiernik

Archive and Location in Archive are used to refer to physical archives for historical works and to refer to items retrieved from electronic archives. For example, an electronic archive number is preferred by APA over publisher/place.

APA doesn’t use the library catalog or call number fields, but MLA does (these are rarely used across styles). These are the fields I would use for this purpose.

zurpher

Thank for the info! So, where would you save, for instance, local library signatures etc.? In the Extra field? I know I could use Notes for that but I would prefer to have the info in the Info tab.

adamsmith

call-number is pretty safe to use for notes for most users. While it _is_ used in over 70 styles, these are mainly the various ISO 690 styles and a collection of French and Eastern European ones, so if you aren't likely to use those, you're fine to use that.

Rights can't be used in citation styles, so if you don't care about cataloging licenses/copyright, that could work.

And yes, Extra is a good choice for personal notes.