Exporting to BibTeX (using Better BibTeX) changes cases in article titles

typhooncamel
If in Zotero I have a reference with a title in sentence case, no matter what when I export it to a bib file, the exported file capitalizes every word of the title. Is there a way to prevent that from happening?
  • poettli
    edited July 25, 2019
    How to suppress the capitalization and why the capitalization.
  • bwiernik
    This is the expected behavior—most BibTeX processors expect titles to be supplied in Title Case and will convert to sentence case based on the style. Any words you have stored in uppercase in Zotero will be escaped in the BibTeX output to prevent them being converted to lowercase by the BibTeX processor. You should let this stay as it is.
  • fuhrmanator
    "Any words you have stored in uppercase in Zotero will be escaped in the BibTeX output..."

    I don't think this is working in the latest version. I have a reference with an acronym, such as ABcD, in the title and it is not escaped properly when exported to BibTeX, e.g., "ABcD: a new tool for debugging Java" should be "{ABcD}: a new tool for debugging {Java}", right? Is there an option to have this behavior? Perhaps I should ask a different question about this case?
  • adamsmith
    is this Zotero's BibTeX or Better BibTeX's?
  • bwiernik
    No, it should be: "{ABcD}: A New Tool for Debugging {Java}" or "{{ABcD}}: A New Tool for Debugging {{Java}}". As I said above, BibTeX processors expect titles to be stored in Title Case (the opposite of CSL). This is the correct behavior. Exporting it in sentence case would not yield correct output in BibTeX for citation styles that want title cased titles.
  • fuhrmanator
    My bad - Google found me this thread when I was confused about Zotero's default export. I didn't realize there was a Better BibTeX extension, but I'm using it now (it's great!). Sorry for the noise.

This is an old discussion that has not been active in a long time. Before commenting here, you should strongly consider starting a new discussion instead. If you think the content of this discussion is still relevant, you can link to it from your new discussion.

Sign In or Register to comment.