When creating a bibliography for an item in APA 7 format, I'm having an issue with the title. Per the APA, only the first letter of the title should be capitalized (and also the first letter after a colon or a name). However, Zotero uses Title Case.
Example: Title (by the author): "The Story of Morgan: Best Dog Ever" Should be cited in APA 7: "The story of Morgan: Best dog ever" when exported, but it's not.
I can fix this by changing the title in Zotero manually, but I shouldn't have to. Reason: the title is not changed by the author, it's just the format that APA requires. I shouldn't have to edit the title just to satisfy APA. (Do you sense my frustration with the APA??)
Is there a way to make Zotero do this automatically so that it's in line with the 7th edition of APA?
I'm glad to run into this thread. It was so helpful. Is Sentence case or BBT sentence case more error-proof across different citation styles? Thank you.
Depends on what you mean by that. BBT's automated sentence case is a little more sophisticated than Zotero's right-click conversion, but the only way to get this right reliably is to have the items in sentence case in Zotero, i.e. manually correct any issues.
BBT sentence case is now one option from the drop-down as we right-click the title in Zotero's right plane. Being able to click and choose to switch cases is already huge. The entry formats don't appear differently in the .bib file so I just want to know which option is more efficient.
You should store your items in sentence case. BBT will convert them back to title case and escape as needed when you export to .bib. It does that really well.
The built in and BBT sentence case are essentially the same. The only difference is that BBT will recognize if there is an all-caps abbreviation (like “APA”) within a title and not lower case those. You should still check that the capitalization of proper nouns is correct after running either, and note that the first letter after a colon should be in lower case unless it’s a proper noun
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Example:
Title (by the author): "The Story of Morgan: Best Dog Ever"
Should be cited in APA 7: "The story of Morgan: Best dog ever" when exported, but it's not.
I can fix this by changing the title in Zotero manually, but I shouldn't have to. Reason: the title is not changed by the author, it's just the format that APA requires. I shouldn't have to edit the title just to satisfy APA. (Do you sense my frustration with the APA??)
Is there a way to make Zotero do this automatically so that it's in line with the 7th edition of APA?
The built in and BBT sentence case are essentially the same. The only difference is that BBT will recognize if there is an all-caps abbreviation (like “APA”) within a title and not lower case those. You should still check that the capitalization of proper nouns is correct after running either, and note that the first letter after a colon should be in lower case unless it’s a proper noun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truecasing