Not proper APA

TinaBB
edited November 11, 2018
Hi there,
When Zotero creates a bibliography in APA, with the sources it has extracted, it doesn't follow the APA guideline with respect to when capital letters should be used.

(E.g. for a book title, only the first letter after punctuation should be capitalized, but Zotero capitalizes every first letter for each word in the title.) Is there a way to fix this so that I don't have to manually change the letters to lowercase myself?
  • bwiernik
    You need to store the titles in Sentence Case in your library. Zotero assumes that any capital letter is a proper noun that should always be in upper case. Right click on the Title field to quickly change to Sentence Case.

    See https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/sentence_casing
  • frankcsliu
    edited December 29, 2022
    I wish the sentence case could automatically upper the first letter of the word following ":" so that the title could better fit the request from APA style.

    I just realized that "Zotero will automatically capitalize the subtitle for styles that require it."--quoted from the webpage mentioned above--only when you export bib. That is good cus I save a lot of time not to change letters after colons for every entry. But it will be wonderful if this style could be seen in every entry. It is just a suggestion for better user experience. Thank you for making Zotero better.
  • dstillman
    edited December 29, 2022
    @frankcsliu: Not all sentence-case styles require the first word after a colon to be capitalized, so it needs to be stored in lowercase like the rest of the title. In APA and other styles that require this, the first word will be capitalized, the same way that the entire title will be titled-cased in styles that require that.

    The title within Zotero isn't in any particular style, so APA's rules aren't relevant.
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