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I am writing my PhD thesis and stumbled over a small issue with my citations. I am using TexMaker to write my thesis. I am using Citavi to orgnaize my .bib file and in there, the titles are correct in terms of capitalized articles (see attached image) Title in the .bib file generated by Citavi

Now, if I use BibTex it generates the .bbl file with all the citations I am using in may file. In there only the first letter is capitalized Title in the .bbl file created by BibTex

I found in a very informative article from Claus O. Wilke that this seems to be a known issue wit BibTex. His solution is to use {} for the words that should be capitalized. Now as my thesis has around 200 citations this would be a massive hustle.

Is there any way to "fine tune" how the format of the .bbl file will look like after I use BibTex? I'd rather just use Citavi and organize all my sources in there, then export it to a .bib file and simply use BibTex with the exact same format as in the generated .bib file.

Jan
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  • Just read about "Bibltex" and "biber" and how this isn't a problem anymore? – Jan May 31 '22 at 14:15
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    You can either use a different BibTeX style that provides the capitalization you desire or, with the current style, in the .bib file, embrace those letters that you wish to be unaffected by BiBTeX's machinations: {A}dlayer-{F}ree {L}arge-{A}rea... – Steven B. Segletes May 31 '22 at 15:13
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    It shouldn't be too difficult to add {...} around your capital letters in your .bib file. A regular expression could do it. – Ingmar May 31 '22 at 15:20
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    The output you are seeing is a feature of your style. The best input in your case would be title = {Adlayer-Free Large-Area Single Crystal Graphene Grown on a {Cu(111)} Foil}, with title case and brace protection for proper nouns/abbreviations etc. If you don't want the title to be converted to sentence case, the best solution is to use a different style (or to modify the current style to stop using sentence case). Ad-hoc brace protection for all capital letters or the entire title is generally not a great idea. – moewe May 31 '22 at 17:53

1 Answers1

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For BibTeX: it is not a "known issue". It is "by-design". If you want to use BibTeX, then you will need to either

  1. follow the design rules and put braces around enforced capitalizations in the title; or
  2. use a bibliographic style that doesn't do the automatic lower case conversion. (See e.g. this answer.)

If you don't want to do all the retyping by-hand, and if you don't want to go through the harrowing experience of making your own .bst file, and if you trust that you have correctly capitalized every entry yourself in the original source, you can just make sure every title is doubly encased in braces. You can automate this by passing the generated (from your citation manager) .bib file through a filter to double-brace all article titles. For example, the following sed invocation:

sed -e "s/title\s*=\s*{\(.*\)}/title = {{\1}}/g" <filename.bib>

should do the trick. (There may be unintended consequences, though. See the comments in the answer linked above.)

Biblatex is a different implementation of bibliography. If you wish to use it, you should read its manual. (It requires some [small number of] additional changes to your document.) In biblatex whether the title is converted to lowercase again depends on the document language and the bibliography style used; but the standard styles do not do any conversion.

Willie Wong
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  • The biblatex standard styles do not apply sentence casing by default. Some contributed styles like biblatex-apa and biblatex-trad do and generally use the language-sensitive \MakeSentenceCase* that changes the case only for languages where it makes sense. Of course this relies on the user marking up the languages correctly. – moewe May 31 '22 at 17:43
  • @moewe: I may be misinterpreting it, but the manual states (page 264, footnote 38) "By default, converting to sentence case is enabled for the following language identifiers: american, british, canadian, english, australian, newzealand as well as the aliases USenglish and UKenglish." Does this mean something different? – Willie Wong May 31 '22 at 18:24
  • It means that sentence casing is enabled if the command \MakeSentenceCase* is used. But the standard styles don't use it, so you get no sentence casing even with those languages. – moewe May 31 '22 at 18:25
  • @moewe: ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification, I'll edit the answer. – Willie Wong May 31 '22 at 18:25