New to Zotero: Capitalization problem

kirkkasson
I am a Divinity student who is required to use the Turabian 8th edition format. When I import bibliographic data from Amazon, EBSCO, etc., I get book and journal titles that are not capitalized. Why is this?
  • adamsmith
    Do you mean in Zotero or in the citation? Capitalization for Turabian would happen when you generate the citations/bibliography, not when you save items into Zotero.

    If the citation/bibliography entry looks wrong, could you post a couple of examples here?
  • Muruganandan
    Dear Smith and Zotero team,
    I came to post a new discussion about capitalization, but after searching for possible solutions, thought it'd be good to continue in this thread.
    I experience Zotero inserting author names in certain entries in full caps while only the first letter is capitalized in most other entries. Here are some examples:
    Citations:
    (MEHROTRA, 2011)
    (Siebers, 2008)
    (Beemyn & Rankin, 2011)

    Bibliography:
    Beemyn, G., & Rankin, S. (Eds.). (2011). EXPERIENCES OF TRANSGENDER IDENTITY. In The Lives of Transgender People (pp. 39–77). Columbia University Press. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/beem14306.7
    MEHROTRA, N. (2011). Disability Rights Movements in India: Politics and Practice. Economic and Political Weekly, 46(6), 65–72.
    Siebers, T. (2008). Disability Theory. University of Michigan Press.

    of these, (MEHROTRA, 2011) entry alone is entered (author's name) in full caps. I saved this entry from JSTOR or EPW journal web page (I forgot exactly from where of these 2...) , others from Jstor and Amazon. Some other entries have also been inserted in author-name full-caps form. Unfortunately, since I'm a screen reader user, I couldn't recognize this till an editor pointed this out to me just now...
  • fbennett
    Are you quite certain that the title "EXPERIENCES OF TRANSGENDER IDENTITY" is not entered in full caps in your Zotero database?
  • Muruganandan
    I just checked, yes, the title "EXPERIENCES OF TRANSGENDER IDENTITY" appears in full caps. Likewise, (MEHROTRA, 2011) entry database also has the author's name in full caps. Can similar entries in the database cause this problem? I saved these entries from JSTOR,, how could this be so? Or is there any possibility of introducing capitalization settings in Zotero so as to create citations with appropriate capitals irrespective of
    the case in which entries are saved in database?
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited February 18, 2019
    For titles you can right-click on unselected titles and convert them to an approximation of sentence -- only you must edit proper nouns so that the first character is upper case.

    With author names... many of the translators will automatically fix all-caps names.
  • Muruganandan
    Sorry, I'm unable to grasp that. I'm using only keyboard commands as a screen reader, my application key takes only to the options available for selected items. Could you please suggest how to change the titles into sentence case with keyboard commands?
  • bwiernik
    Unfortunately, I am not seeing a way at the moment to access the right-click menu for fields that aren't selected (where the case change options are) from the keyboard. @dstillman
  • Muruganandan
    I'll perhaps take assistance from my sighted wife or friends for working it out for now, but please think of introducing keyboard shortcuts and accessibility features to the Zotero application even though its quite better than the similar programs.
    But one clarification again, can I change the sentence case for all entries at once in that way? It'll be much easier for me if so, I've to depend on others for changing entries each time otherwise!
  • adamsmith
    No, I'm afraid this needs to be done one-by-one (FWIW, it's _possible_ to do this with keyboard shortcuts, you just have to manually edit the field every time instead of the convenient right-click shortcut. Not to say that said shortcut shouldn't be made accessible, which it of course should)
  • Muruganandan
    Yes, I can do that on my own for the time being, will edit such entries in the relevant fields...
    Thank you.
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