APA 7 article titles incorrectly capitalized.

darcyiris
edited 18 days ago
Half the time when I use Zotero to create references in APA 7th edition, the journal article title has incorrect capitalization. I have combed through recent changes from APA 6 to 7 but using "sentence case" capitalization (everything lowercase except the first word, proper nouns, and the first word after a colon) for journal article titles remains the standard as far as I can tell. Why isn't Zotero doing this correctly? Here's an example copied directly from Zotero:

Rendall, D., Vokey, J. R., & Nemeth, C. (2007). Lifting the Curtain on the Wizard of Oz: Biased Voice-Based Impressions of Speaker Size. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance, 33(5), 1208–1219. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.33.5.1208

From the style manual, a correct APA 7 citation should be:

Rendall, D., Vokey, J. R., & Nemeth, C. (2007). Lifting the curtain on the Wizard of Oz: Biased voice-based impressions of speaker size. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance, 33(5), 1208–1219. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.33.5.1208

I have dozens of other examples from Zotero. I wrote an entire book chapter using Zotero for my bibliography in APA, and I encountered this issue constantly. It is annoying to have to correct the capitalization of every journal article title.

Can this please be fixed? Are others encountering this?
  • adamsmith
    https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/sentence_casing
  • mb22la
    Did your Zotero at least manage to italicise the Journal Title? I have noticed there are some things from APA 7 that Zotero doesn't handle properly. This is one of those issues.
    Until it's fixed, I always have apa.org and Purdue OWL open, so I fix the citations as I go. I have become very familiar with Word's format painter and the Change Case tool.

    For whatever shortcomings, Zotero's still pretty great and saves me a lot of time!
  • bwiernik
    edited 17 days ago
    @mb22la Zotero’s APA style is extremely accurate and tested against the APA manual, so if you are seeing something you think isn’t correct, please report it. It very likely is a bug or misunderstanding.

    Especially things like italics should never need to be manually corrected, so if italics aren’t showing correctly, something is wrong.
  • mb22la
    Should I leave a comment for every time I see something? Or compile a list and send it somewhere?

    E.g., I posted about a week ago (I think) that the podcast template doesn't include a date, but there's certainly a date according to APA. In fact, there are key things that are always included, which are author (or organisation or title where those other things can't be found), date, and title when authors exist. So, if any of the templates don't include a date, that's an error.
  • JDErasmusOT
    My professor commented on needing to ensure that the issue and page numbers need to be italicized in the APA7 formatting style which Zotero does not currently seem to be doing for me...
    Any suggestions?
  • adamsmith
    edited 16 days ago
    Your professor is wrong. See APA's own guidance here: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/journal-article-references#1

    The volume should be italicized (and Zotero does that), issue and page numbers should not be.
  • bwiernik
    For podcasts, enter date in Extra like this:
    Issued: 2025-03-15
  • dstillman
    (And many new fields are coming, including Date for Podcast items, which is already available in the Zotero 7.1 beta.)
  • mb22la
    Oh good! I have a whole list of things that the podcast template needs. :-)
  • bwiernik
    See here for how to enter data for podcasts.

    https://www.zotero.org/groups/2205533/test_items_library/collections/MR2N872S/items/HYEYQKKT/item-details
    https://www.zotero.org/groups/2205533/test_items_library/collections/MR2N872S/items/HWIMSJBJ/item-details
  • mb22la
    edited 16 days ago
    Fair, but that's not nearly as intuitive as every other way details are entered for other item types. Let's use date as an example: for book sections, I enter the date for the book in the date field. For podcasts, I'm supposed to intuitively know to 1. put the date in the Extra field, 2. enter it specifically as yyyy-mm-dd for single dates or yyyy/yyyy for ranges, and 3. also know I need to tag it as Issued: before the date? What's easier is putting a date field in the template that operates like it does for every other item type.
    Also, I'm pretty sure that field never pulls automatically, so I have to always manually enter it, which is what I do when I review my reference list for accuracy and formatting.

    However, I thank you, truly, for telling me how to hack the current format. :-)
  • adamsmith
    Right, that's where the announcement by dstillman above comes in

    We don't currently import podcast from anywhere, I believe (we used to support Stitcher but that went under), but if we do, I'm pretty sure the data would import as such, yes.
  • mb22la
    edited 16 days ago
    That makes sense since a lot of hosting platforms are subscriber-based. But if we're locating the podcast via a webpage in order to get a URL for it, wouldn't that work like grabbing the date from a webpage?

    I'm thinking of times when I've grabbed an episode from Brené Brown's webpage where she has her podcast available in addition to being on various streaming platforms.

    For an actual discussion on podcast citations, I posted about 13 days ago, and I updated it yesterday:
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/122424/podcasts-are-all-these-items-being-fixed#latest

    I have a list of things I found didn't work according to APA. Might be that I just don't know how to input them (like that pesky date issue).
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