No Title in MLA Style

gingerbrioche
Hello,

I'm using Zotero 2.8.1 with Mac Word Integration 3.1.3; recently I've encountered two problems:
- of four books by same author, only in one case do citations include the title of the books. Other citations just include the page number and name of author, making citations ambiguous.
- in citations, titles in all caps (like CW for complete works), become capitalized only at the beginning.
How can I fix that?
Thanks!
  • adamsmith
    the first issues will be fixed in the next version of Zotero.
    The second issue is more complicated - Zotero title cases MLA (as required), but I feel like it should be able to not touch abbreviations in all caps.
  • ajlyon
    If title casing is turning CW into Cw and USSR into Ussr, then that's a bug.
  • fbennett
    edited July 20, 2011
    So the idea would be that:A Semiotic Analysis of Mr Blobbyshould become:A semiotic analysis of Mr Blobby
    But:Showdown at the WTO panel hearingshould become:Showdown at the WTO Panel Hearing
    That is, things that are in all-caps should just stay in all-caps? (Unless the entire string is in all-caps, of course, in which case there's not enough information to go on.)
  • fbennett
    edited July 20, 2011
    According to this test, this should already be working correctly -- see the samples in the RESULT block.

    @gingerbrioche: If you're getting an unexpected result, could you post the input string that produces it?
  • adamsmith
    edited July 20, 2011
    That is, things that are in all-caps should just stay in all-caps? (Unless the entire string is in all-caps, of course,
    yes, I think that's exactly right - I think the title casing in some of the translators may already do exactly that.
  • gingerbrioche
    So that's a short title: OC 1, which appears as Oc 1. I'm not sure what the input string is, but if you give me a link where it's explained, I'll look up for it? Thanks for your help. Also, it seems the titles appear after the name of the author in the footnotes, but not in the body of the text.
  • fbennett
    The form in which it appears in the document is the output string: that's everything we need.

    This case (no pun intended -- really) is skirting close to the point of diminishing returns in smartening up the conversion. I think we have three choices. Feedback on which way to go would be very welcome.

    First, we could always treat all-caps titles as intentionally all-caps, and render them that way. All-caps titles that find their way into the database would never be transformed. This would make things simpler in the code, which would be good, but might also cause surprise and minor crises when all-caps titles that rendered correctly in previous processor versions suddenly start coming out in all-caps.

    Second, I could extend the processor to handle the OC 1 case correctly, by treating any title that contains a number as a mixed-case string (single all-caps short words in a mixed-case string are not touched by the current function). Alternatively, words consisting entirely of numbers could be ignored in the scan for all-caps words in the string (which would make the string one word long in this case -- and short single-word titles in all caps are assumed to be in the correct case already).

    Neither of the "second" approaches is 100% robust, so if we went this route, we would still run into cases that come out wrong.

    Third, we could introduce quoted-escaping, so that "OC 1" (with quotes) would always come out as OC 1. This is a hack, but it has the advantage of giving greater control over output, which can be important for edge cases as deadlines loom. We already allow quoted escaping in names fields, so it is not a complete divergence from current practice. This third approach could be combined with the second.

    Thoughts?
  • gingerbrioche
    I think quoted-escaping sounds good, but the first solution doesn't sound bad either, in the sense that I don't think the number of all-caps titles that find their way to the database is statistically significant. But I might be wrong on that.
  • fbennett
    I've opted to treat strings containing numbers as mixed-case. This will preserve all all-caps words as all-caps where a number occurs, which covers the sample case. If we see more exceptions, there may be a case for quoted-escaping, but for now let's leave it there and see how we get on.

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