Not capitalizing correctly in Chicago MOS, Word

isabelleheadrick

Zotero is no longer correctly capitalizing footnotes and bibliographies as it did before. It capitalizes some random entries correctly but not others. This seems to be recent as it did correctly capitalize in papers I wrote a while back. I have the most updated version of Zotero and refreshed the MS Word Add-in. Please help me resolve this. Thanks.

bwiernik

Can you give an example of an item not capitalizing correctly?

isabelleheadrick

Here are 4 bibliographic entries, pasted in directly from my Zotero (each separately). Note that some are correct and others are not, even though none are actually capitalized in my Zotero.

Rodrigue, Aron. Jews and Muslims: images of Sephardi and eastern Jewries in modern times. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.

Ebrahimnejad, Hormoz. Medicine in Iran: Profession, Practice and Politics 1800-1925. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Chaquèri, Cosroe, ed. The Armenians of Iran: the paradoxical role of a minority in a dominant culture ; articles and documents. Harvard Middle Eastern monographs 30. Cambridge, Mass: distributed for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University by Harvard University Press, 1998.

Hegland, Mary Elaine. Days of Revolution: Political Unrest in an Iranian Village, 2014.

adamsmith

Do the ones that aren't capitalized have anything in the "Language" field in Zotero? If so, what? (It should be either nothing or some version of "en" or "English").

If not, what's the short title on all of these four items?

isabelleheadrick

Oh, wow, that's interesting. Indeed, I used the "language" field for something other than language (see another post I wrote about wanting custom fields). So the ones where I filled in Language with another value are messed up; the ones that are coming out correctly have the Language field blank.

bwiernik

Yes, I recommend storing custom information in Extra or as notes or Tags, rather than appropriating other fields.

isabelleheadrick

I know you and I have discussed this before...:). Since I really do prefer to use fields when possible, and I am already using Extra for something else, which are the ones I CANNOT use "safely," (i.e. without messing up the codes) such as Language. Are there others? That way I will know which ones are safe to use. Thanks.

bwiernik

Library Catalog and Call Number are pretty rarely used (unless you use MLA style), so those are what I would use. The others are used pretty commonly.

But you can also store multiple items on separate lines in Extra. That would be my main suggestion.

adamsmith

Rights is another option; that's currently not used in any style.

Flora57

In Chicago format, the titles of journal articles should be capitalized in sentence format (i.e. not every word capitalized) but Zotero always capitalizes every word in my journal article titles and I have to go back and correct each one manually. Any solution for this?

Flora57

Some of the entries that are not correct have the language field blank and some have English in the language field.

bwiernik

You are mistaken. Chicago style prints English journal article titles in title case, not sentence case: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-1.html

scheydec

I'm having the opposite problem. I used the "Add items by identifier" magic wand, and it brought everything into the fields in sentence case. My preferences are set to Default Format = Chicago Manual of Style 17th Edition (note).

But when I do File --> Export Library and export it to BibTex for use in a LaTeX document, it doesn't apply Title Case. I had to manually adjust all of the entries (which had blank "Language" fields) to get the right case in my .bib file.

How can I get Zotero to put things in Title Case? The support page at http://www.zotero.org/support/adding_items_to_zotero says, "Because citation styles differ in their casing requirements, and because automatic conversion from Sentence case to Title Case is much more accurate than the other way around, we recommend that you always store titles in your Zotero library in sentence case. Zotero can then reliably convert titles to Title Case in rendered bibliographies when the chosen citation style calls for it."

But it's not doing that. Am I missing something? I've used Zotero for years, but have been away from it for ~6 months.

Thanks!

adamsmith

@emilianoeheyns you've thought about this more with bibtex and I always get confused -- do you title case on export?

emilianoeheyns

By default, yes.

emilianoeheyns

@scheydec I think there two separate things being discussed here. I'm going to assume you have all your items in Zotero in sentence case, some of those have no language filled out, some have an "engl-ish" language (american, british, canadian, english, australian, new zealand, USenglish, UKenglish, and some popular misspellings which I pick up using heuristics), some have another value set for language.

When you say

My preferences are set to Default Format = Chicago Manual of Style 17th Edition (note).

that affects how Zotero itself generates citations and bibliographies. This does not affect Bib(La)TeX exports in any way. This is also what

The support page at http://www.zotero.org/support/adding_items_to_zotero says, "Because citation styles differ in their casing requirements, and because automatic conversion from Sentence case to Title Case is much more accurate than the other way around, we recommend that you always store titles in your Zotero library in sentence case. Zotero can then reliably convert titles to Title Case in rendered bibliographies when the chosen citation style calls for it."

talks about. That explanation addresses how the embedded citeproc generates output; none of it relates to Bib(La)TeX exports.

If you export to Bib(La)TeX, BBT will change some titles to Title Case. I've just looked at the stock translators, and I don't think they do Title Casing, even if there is some code commented out that hints that it either once did or had plans to do it. The rest here will concern BBT exports, which I know better than the stock exports.

BBT will title-case titles if the language on an item is either empty, or "engl-ish". Not the entire title is necessarily title-cased; there are exempt words, <span class="nocase">...</span> snippets are exempt, and punctuation can affect the title-casing. An entry that has a non-engl-ish language set is assumed to be "other" and will not be title-cased in line with the recommendation from the biblatex manual (search the manual for "MakeSentenceCase").

So as far as I can tell, the answer to your question

How can I get Zotero to put things in Title Case (when exporting to Bib(La)TeX)

is "use BBT". If that assessment is wrong I don't mind being corrected on it, but I don't see any code in the stock BibTeX.js or BibLaTeX.js that actually does title-casing.

You can disable BBT title-casing but my take is that you generally shouldn't, unless you never use Zotero with Word and just use it as a bibtex manager. But I use it as a bibtex manager almost exclusively, and I don't have it disabled.

adamsmith

is "use BBT". If that assessment is wrong I don't mind being corrected on it, but I don't see any code in the stock BibTeX.js or BibLaTeX.js that actually does title-casing.

That's correct. It's in part why I asked you, because I thought stock bibtext did that, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

scheydec

Thank you - that seems to have worked. Here's what I got as output when I put one word in a title back to sentence-case:

@book{alvarengaGrailArthurHis2013,
title = {The Grail, {{Arthur}} and {{His Knights}}: {{A Symbolic Jungian Reading}}},
shorttitle = {The {{Grail}}, {{Arthur}} and {{His Knights}}},
author = {de Alvarenga, Maria Zelia},
year = {2013},
publisher = {{Karnac}},
address = {{London}},
isbn = {978-1-78049-141-7},
keywords = {Arthur,Grail,Individuation (Psychology),Jungian psychology},
lccn = {PN685 .A4813 2013}
}

("grail" is the word whose capitalization I changed.) I assume LaTeX won't have a problem with the double-brackets for words that were already capitalized.

But in TexShop, after I run LaTeX on the document, do I run BibTeX, or do I have to add BBT to TexShop?

Thanks!

emilianoeheyns

LaTeX won't have a problem, but you should change the entire title to sentence case in Zotero, excluding the proper nouns of course. Not only will it look better, styles like Turabian won't render properly with those braces. They will also not render properly in word/libreoffice.

Doesn't texshop automatically run latex and biber the right amount of time? I don't use texshop, so I can't say for sure what to do. But I don't know what it would mean to add BBT to texshop.

Unless you're constrained by the journal you're aiming for, I'd strongly recommend biblatex over bibtex btw.