APA 6 help

Hi everyone,

I am using the APA6 csl, and having some difficulties I was hoping someone could help out with.

Currently, journal titles are being capitalized, where I only want the first letter of the first word in caps. Conversely, the title of the journal is not and caps, and I need it to be. I thought I was pretty nifty with xml, but apparently not so much.

Could anyone point me to the area in the csl file I need to edit?

Thanks in advance!
  • If I understand you correctly you want titles (of journal articles and otherwise) for APA in sentence case, but journal titles in title case.

    Generally, we recommend you to store all titles in sentence case in Zotero (you can convert to pseudo sentence case by right-clicking on a title). The APA style leaves titles as they are. While it's possible to convert to sentence case in CSL using text-case="sentence", the results are unsatisfactory because it's impossible to properly automate sentence case (esp. bc of proper nouns). Conversly, the names of journals are proper nouns and should be entered properly capitalized - if you want to do that in the style, use text-case="title" on the container-title but again, there is a reason that's not the case for the APA style on the repo.
  • (We should really have a KB article for this.)
  • edited July 11, 2012
    The proper case format for journal titles has been discussed before. I disagree with Sebastian's argument that because the entire journal title is a proper noun it should be title cased.

    Is it not better to enter journal titles in sentence case and provide a means of conversion to title case when needed?

    Accepted standards bodies' documents (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules and ISO 4:1997) require that journal titles be in sentence case.

    Journal titles downloaded records from various bibliographic databases differ in their practices. Databases differ in their practices of case standards for journal titles in downloaded records. PubMed/Medline provides sentence case journal titles. The eiCompendex and PsycInfo send journal titles in title case.

    I have had scores of requests to convert to sentence case all journal titles in my online bibliographic database. These requests have come mainly from South America, Asia, and southern Europe. I don't recall any from the USA. The argument they make is that some publishers want it that way and it is impossible to accurately automate converting from title case to sentence case. The requests also point out that the casing for languages other than English follow different rules.

    For the last few months I have also received similar requests for sentence (mixed) case for journal abbreviations. Both of the standards allow each abbreviated word to begin with upper case but both recommend against it.

    I am in the process of converting all journal titles in SafetyLit to sentence case. We are still thinking about the abbreviations.
  • We would need to have smarter title casing before that would work sufficiently well.
    Currently, title casing would mess up titles such
    Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie
    by turning it into the unambiguously incorrect
    Kölner Zeitschrift Für Soziologie Und Sozialpsychologie
    (an increasing number of journals with non-English names publish English articles, so using the language field won't help)
    as well as many journals with Latin names.

    I don't really see a way to get around that easily.
  • Title casing for English language items is quite "smart". The conversion seems to recognize the rules for articles, conjunctions, infinitives, prepositions, etc. Each other language has its own rules and conventions. It seems that these conventions are usually followed in non-English journal titles and words are already cased properly to be the non-English equivalent of "sentence-case". When I see these as citations in "maximum" title-case it is usually in American journals and, as you say, the casing is clearly wrong (although not necessarily as extremely wrong as your example). I didn't mean to suggest that sentence- to title-casing would be easy or simple. I am suggesting that journal names be entered in the appropriate case for their language. With English language journals, Zotero already has the rules for changing case.

    Remember, I am mainly commenting upon my preference for casing of the journal names. I don't think that the language content of the journal (contains articles in English or not) should have any role in decisions about casing of the words in the journal name.

    I apologize for taking this thread off a far different direction. Not only was this impolite but I suspect that some others who would like to comment have missed this dialog.
  • Thanks to everyone for their comments and help. It is very much appreciated. So essentially, I can have a play with changing text case to title and sentence and see what difference it makes, and make a decision from there?

    Is anyone able to tell me where exactly to insert said text case descriptors in the csl file?

    Thanks again
  • look at the macros "title" (for titles) and "container" (for book and journal titles). But I'd really recommend storing item titles in sentence case - it's what all the styles on the repository assume.

    @DWL - you want to open a new thread?

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