Proper noun capitalisation in titles when exporting to BibLaTex

Hello. I'm fairly new to Zotero and I can't work out how to maintain capitalization when exporting using BibLaTex. I've done a fairly extensive google and still can't work it out so I figured I would ask.

I know the preference in Zotero is to keep everything in sentence case, and whether titles are capitalized or not depends on the style I'm using.

Here is an example title that's saved in Zotero as "The quick BROWN fox JumPed over the fence in France". This exports to bibtex as:
@article{noauthor_quick_nodate,
title = {The quick {BROWN} fox {JumPed} over the fence in {France}},
}

Which is great, it let's the style choose capitalization for every word except initialism/acronyms and France which should be capitalized. Same would go for any company names.

However the same title exports to biblatex as:
@article{noauthor_quick_nodate,
title = {The quick {BROWN} fox {JumPed} over the fence in France},
}

The acronyms are protected but the word France isn't. When I go and use this with BibLaTex and styles that keep titles in lower case, it doesn't capitalize France.

I've tried adding {} around France in Zotero but they are escaped. How can I make sure nouns in my titles are identified when exporting to biblatex?

Thanks for your time.
  • If you are actually writing in TeX with Zotero, you want to install the BetterBibTeX plugin and use its “Better BibTeX” or “Better BibLaTeX” formats. Those are designed to handle a wide manner of peculiarities of TeX parsers.
  • Thank you for your comment. Can you clarify what you mean by "writing in TeX with Zotero"?

    I'm a little unsure of using a plugin because I'm using Zotero in a big team and I'd like it to stay consistent when sharing, but I will look into it.

    So is there no way to make Zotero keep capitalization for nouns with the default exporter? I thought this would be a common issue so I'm not sure if I'm missing the correct way to do it.
  • I'm sure this could be fixed in Zotero, yes, and we can look at it -- it's just that BBT's support for details in BibTeX and BibLaTeX export is quite a bit better, so it's not a huge priority. In fact, if you're working in a large team, I'd say using BBT is even more indispensable, because it guarantees stability and uniqueness of citekeys within a given library: Zotero's stock export currently does not.
  • Okay, thank you for your help.
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