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I use Papers app for organizing papers, thesis, and dissertation. When I use its 'copy as BibTeX' feature, it returns similar to this one:

@phdthesis{Taylor:2000vh,
author = {Fields, Ray Thomas},
title = {{Architectural styles and Architectures}},
school = {University of California, Berkeley},
year = {2000},
address = {University of California, Berkeley},
month = jan
}

Also from other examples from https://verbosus.com/bibtex-style-examples.html, the title has only one parenthesis.

What's the difference between single parenthesis and double parenthesis in BibTeX? Is there any reason why the title has double parenthesis when others do not?

prosseek
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  • It's very unfortunate that some bibliography making pieces of software such as Zotero or Mendeley seize the initiative and always enclose titles in double braces, making ineffective the possible bib style choice to lowercase titles. – egreg Aug 31 '16 at 16:04
  • I don't think Zotero has ever done this, but it certainly doesn't do it now. – retorquere Feb 09 '20 at 01:08

1 Answers1

9

bibtex and biblatex styles may change the capitalization of titles to match the style defaults. Double curly braces protect parts of the fields against this behavior e.g. to ensure that acronyms like {IEEE} remain all capitals. With bibtex, putting the whole title in double curly braces prevents changes to the case at all. biblatex with the biber backend will, however, ignore this special case due to the excessive use in automated bibtex exports.

languitar
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    The last sentence is no longer true with recent versions of biblatex and Biber. But I still recommend the approach of bracing only those words that need it and not the entire title. – moewe Mar 11 '19 at 23:17
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    @moewe so {{Intel Atom E3826 specifications}} should be interpreted as "case-protect all the things" again? Issue for me is of course that many .bib files were crafted while the "ignore first level of a double-brace" was still in effect. – retorquere Dec 21 '19 at 21:07