Incorrect Citing Styles

jjhoppermusic
I am preparing a research paper that needs to be cited according to APA (7th Edition). In this style, journal articles should be cited like this: Hisakata, R., Nishida, S., & Johnston, A. (2016). An adaptable metric shapes perceptual space. Current Biology, 26(14), 1911–1915. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.05.047. This one is listed in Zotero's Reference Depository. Notice how after the date, the title is written in all lower case letters except for the first word (or words following :).

When I select this option, though, my sources are cited like this: Fisher, R. A., Hoult, A. R., & Tucker, W. S. (2020). A Comparison of Facial Muscle Activation for Vocalists and Instrumentalists. Journal of Music Teacher Education, 30(1), 53–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1057083720947412. It's all capitalized just like it was written in the pdf's. I even checked according to the APA Manual (7th Edition), and the first style is correct.

I believe that Zotero is not correctly creating my APA bibliography.
  • damnation
    In Zotero, right click on the title and choose sentence case.
    This is an issue with your metadata, not the citation style.
  • adamsmith
    More generally https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/sentence_casing
  • Mikearama
    Thanks for the tip jjhoppermusic is correct that this should be the default for the style, it should not need to be manually changed since it is unvarying in APA 7th ed.
  • DWL-SDCA
    @Mikearama It appears that you are misunderstanding the issue @jjhoppermusic raised. See the documentation link provided by @adamsmith

    ...it should not need to be manually changed since it is unvarying in APA

    The metadata that is imported into Zotero depends on policies of journal and book publishers. Zotero provides a shortcut to assist with editing the various formatted titles (all-upper-case, title case, etc.) provided by the publisher. The 1000s of styles (of which APA is only one) expect that you have edited the titles of each Zotero record to be in "sentence case". The style creation can reliably convert sentence case to title case but cannot do the opposite.
  • Mikearama
    edited January 23, 2022
    I understand their issue completely because I have the exact same issue. Publishers choose styles such as APA they rarely invoke their own standards. In APA the standards are invariable in the sentence case, therefore it is a universal style issue. APA 7th edition style ALWAY uses sentence case in bibliographic references. When Zotero asks what style the bibliographic entry should be, at that point, the entries should always convert to sentence case, since that is the style. It does not ask "What Journal would you like this styled for?" Because that would be pointless. The author (I) is determining the style. I do not think I am the one not understanding the issue.
  • dstillman
    edited January 23, 2022
    @Mikearama: Yes, you are misunderstanding. Read the documentation page linked to above. A computer can't reliably convert a title to sentence case. That's the point here.
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited January 24, 2022
    @Mikearama This is one of those things that is so basic it is easy to think that it cannot be that simple. Yes, a bit of effort is required but some things cannot be automated.

    You, the Zotero user, will often need to hand edit what you download to your library. (Several major publishers use all-upper-case format for their titles. Article, chapter, and book titles often need to be edited so that software such as Zotero can have a known starting place to use in the conversion to the proper style. Zotero helps give a start to the edit by allowing you to convert all words (except the first) to lower case.

    Zotero can automate most of the import and citation processes. This is something that no personal reference manager can do (convert title case to sentence case) because a human will need to recognize the words that should begin with an upper case character by thinking about the context where the word appears. Please do reread the documentation page. Please do not feel foolish because you are in a "club" where people frequently misjudge this same issue. Your question and frustration is common.

    Just be glad that we live in the 2020s and not in the 1960s and 70s where you had to look at printed index books, take notes, go to bound journals on a library shelf, (and hope that your library has the volume), find the article, copy the information on a note card, and use that to properly format the citation in a manuscript that is typed on a manual typewriter. My college years were in that era and if you didn't live through it you cannot really imagine the ordeal.
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