APA 6 Capitalization Errors in Bibliography

mobie350
I just got nailed on a bibliography generated by Zotero set to APA 6 style. In my bibliography, Zotero is capitalizing all words in the title of each journal article. Apparently, you only capitalize the first word in the title of a journal article in APA 6. Why doesn't Zotero do this automatically? Does anyone know how to fix this?
  • adamsmith
    Zotero prints whatever you have in your database for APA. The reason it doesn't convert capitalizing all words (except articles, conjuctions and prepositions) - so called title case - into capitalizing only the first word and proper nouns - so called sentence case - is that this is virtually impossible to do automatically - Zotero has no way of knowing which words are proper nouns....
    For that reason we recommend that you store all your titles in sentence case - converting to title case automatically is easy and done for styles that require it.
  • mobie350
    Thanks for that info adamsmith. Would I have to manually change the article titles to sentence case after the download or is there an automatic setting for that?
  • adamsmith
    You can set the capitalizeTitles hidden pref
    http://www.zotero.org/support/hidden_prefs#general_preferences
    to false - that way more databases will import sentence case (though you might then get an occasional all caps title, which is why the default is set to true).
    With existing titles, you can right-click on the titles and convert them to all lowercase - you'd then only have to capitalize the first letter, proper nouns, and abbreviations.
    Improving that feature is planned.
  • mobie350
    Thank you, adamsmith.
  • bethwilliamson
    "Zotero prints whatever you have in the database."
    In that case, I don't understand why I'm having a problem: even when I have items entered with the correct capitalisation for the styles I want to use (i.e. mostly sentence case - but without 'in' 'of', 'the' etc capitalized), MHRA seems to convert every word to begin with a capital. From what has been said, Zotero ought to display the titles as I have them saved.
    Does anyone have any ideas what I might be doing wrong?
  • adamsmith
    that statement was for APA.
    Zotero's MHRA style uses title case on purpose - while MHRA is complicated, it requires title case for English titles, so I decided to go with that.

    If you want to change this for your local copy, take out all instances of text-case="title" in your style, following the simple instructions here
    http://www.zotero.org/support/csl_simple_edits
  • bethwilliamson
    Thanks for your response, and sorry I didn't realise that that statement pertained to APA only. I *do* want title case in MHRA, since, as you say, that's correct in MHRA. But what's happening is that I get, for example: Martin Elsky, ‘Words, Things, And Names: Jonson’s Poetry And Philosophical Grammar’, in <I>Classic And Cavalier: Essays On Jonson And The Sons of Ben<I>,
    whereas I should get:
    Martin Elsky, ‘Words, Things, and Names: Jonson’s Poetry and Philosophical
    Grammar’, in <I>Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben<I>

    Is this just something that would have to be manually altered?
    Thanks again.
  • adamsmith
    Is that Zotero 2.1.1? That's weird.
    I get "In" wrongly capitalized, but "and" and "the" are correct for me. In any case, I'll try to see what's up with "In" ("Or" and "On" are also capitalized and shouldn't be).
  • bethwilliamson
    Yes, as far as I know. I downloaded the latest version today. Thanks for having a look at this for me - that's really kind.
  • adamsmith
    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/16999/title-case-regression-in-21-or-csl-10/#Item_8
    this should be solved in the next version of Zotero, due soon, thanks for reporting.
  • DahmSF
    Dear developers,
    I am still having trouble with this using APA7.

    While this journal is correctly with low caps in the bibliography:
    Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance

    Those ones are not:
    Zeitschrift für Sportpsychologie
    Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, Psychologie und Psychotherapie

    It may be a matter of Language.
    Hence in the bibliography 'of' and 'and' remains low caps, while 'für' and 'und' are changed to 'Für' and 'Und'.

    In my opinion, APA style should be the same in all languages :)
  • adamsmith
    APA actually does require title case for journal titles (as opposed to article titles) so this is a bit trickier.
    You can disable it for German-language (or German titled) journals by putting de-DE into the "language" field.
  • DahmSF
    Thanks, this does the trick!
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