Changing Formatting of Edited Volume Bibliography Entries

Question

I have a question about bibliography formatting. I am using Biber and Biblatex to do my bibliographies (in the APA style), but I want to change the formatting of bibliography entries for book chapters from edited volumes.

For every other kind of entry (e.g. for books, journal articles, etc) the title of the entry is capitalised as it is in my .bib file. However, for book chapters from edited volumes, Biblatex automatically capitalises the first letter of the first word and none of the first letters of any of the other words -- even if some of other words' first letters are capitalised in the .bib file.

Here's a MWEB:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
    @book{Adams1998,
        address = {Stanford},
        author = {Adams, Ernest W.},
        file = {:Users/James/Library/Application Support/Mendeley Desktop/Downloaded/Adams - 1998 - A Primer of Probability Logic.pdf:pdf},
        publisher = {CSLI Publications},
        title = {{A Primer of Probability Logic}},
        year = {1998}
    }

    @incollection{Cotnoir2018,
        address = {Cham},
        author = {Cotnoir, Aaron J.},
        booktitle = {Pluralisms in Truth and Logic},
        doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-98346-2_13},
        editor = {Wyatt, Jeremy and Pedersen, Nikolaj J. L. L. and Kellen, Nathan},
        file = {:Users/James/Library/Application Support/Mendeley Desktop/Downloaded/Cotnoir - 2018 - Logical Nihilism.pdf:pdf},
        pages = {301--329},
        publisher = { Palgrave Macmillan},
        title = {{Logical Nihilism}},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98346-2{\_}13},
        year = {2018}
    }

    @article{Steinberger2019,
        author = {Steinberger, Florian},
        doi = {10.5840/jphil201911611},
        file = {:Users/James/Documents/St Andrews/Philosophy/MPhil/MPhil Thesis/Readings/Normativity/Three Ways Logic is Normative Steinberger.pdf:pdf},
        issn = {0022-362X},
        journal = {The Journal of Philosophy},
        month = {mar},
        number = {1},
        pages = {5--31},
        title = {{Three Ways in Which Logic Might Be Normative}},
        url = {http://www.pdcnet.org/oom/service?url{\_}ver=Z39.88-2004{\&}rft{\_}val{\_}fmt={\&}rft.imuse{\_}id=jphil{\_}2019{\_}0116{\_}0001{\_}0005{\_}0031{\&}svc{\_}id=info:www.pdcnet.org/collection},
        volume = {116},
        year = {2019}
    }
\end{filecontents}

\usepackage[style=apa, natbib=true, doi=false, url=false]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{/Users/James/Documents/Testing.bib}
\AtEveryBibitem{\clearfield{number}}
\DeclareFieldFormat[article]{volume}{\apanum{#1}}
\setlength\bibitemsep{1.5\itemsep}



\title{Test Document}

\begin{document}


\maketitle

\citet{Steinberger2019} is a journal article, \citet{Adams1998} is a book, and \citet{Cotnoir2018} is a book chapter in an edited volume.


\printbibliography

\end{document}

This outputs:

I would like the title of the book in the edited volume bibliography entry to be 'Pluralisms in Truth and Logic' (as it is in the .bib file) rather than 'Pluralisms in truth and logic'.

moewe · Accepted Answer · 2019-12-30T14:36:45.583

It is part of APA style (6th and 7th edition if I understand correctly) to convert titles into sentence case (journal names seem to be exempt from this rule).

Your .bib files already works against this for title fields by encasing the complete contents of those fields in curly braces. That prevents the sentence casing code from converting the text into sentence case. I think this is an extremely bad idea. Instead you should only protect words that always need to be exempted from case change for grammatical reasons. If you don't want sentence casing at all, you should tell the style to stop it. You can read more about case changing in BibTeX and biblatex in BibTeX loses capitals when creating .bbl file, Capitalize words in Bibtex files: {Word} or {W}ord?, What is the proper casing to use when storing titles in the bibliography database?, Biblatex changes capitalisation of titles.

Fortunately, that is quite easy to tell biblatex-apa to stop applying sentence case. You just need one line

\DeclareFieldFormat{apacase}{#1}

In full with prettified .bib entries (characters like _ and & that are usually special for TeX do not need escaping in the url or doi fields, those fields are specifically designed to deal with special characters)

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage[style=apa6, natbib=true, doi=false, url=false]{biblatex}

\DeclareFieldFormat{apacase}{#1}

\DeclareFieldFormat[article]{volume}{\apanum{#1}}

\DeclareSourcemap{
  \maps[datatype=bibtex, overwrite]{
    \map{
      \step[fieldset=number, null]
    }
  }
}

\setlength\bibitemsep{1.5\itemsep}

\begin{filecontents}[force]{\jobname.bib}
@book{Adams1998,
  address   = {Stanford},
  author    = {Adams, Ernest W.},
  publisher = {CSLI Publications},
  title     = {A Primer of Probability Logic},
  year      = {1998},
}
@incollection{Cotnoir2018,
  address   = {Cham},
  author    = {Cotnoir, Aaron J.},
  booktitle = {Pluralisms in Truth and Logic},
  doi       = {10.1007/978-3-319-98346-2_13},
  editor    = {Wyatt, Jeremy and Pedersen, Nikolaj J. L. L. and Kellen, Nathan},
  pages     = {301--329},
  publisher = {Palgrave Macmillan},
  title     = {Logical Nihilism},
  year      = {2018},
}
@article{Steinberger2019,
  author  = {Steinberger, Florian},
  doi     = {10.5840/jphil201911611},
  issn    = {0022-362X},
  journal = {The Journal of Philosophy},
  month   = mar,
  number  = {1},
  pages   = {5--31},
  title   = {Three Ways in Which Logic Might Be Normative},
  url     = {http://www.pdcnet.org/oom/service?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=&rft.imuse_id=jphil_2019_0116_0001_0005_0031&svc_id=info:www.pdcnet.org/collection},
  volume  = {116},
  year    = {2019}
}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
\citet{Steinberger2019} is a journal article,
\citet{Adams1998} is a book,
and \citet{Cotnoir2018} is a book chapter in an edited volume.

\printbibliography
\end{document}

Adams, E. W. (1998). A Primer of Probability Logic. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Cotnoir, A. J. (2018). Logical Nihilism. In J. Wyatt, N. J. L. L. Pedersen, & N. Kellen (Eds.), Pluralisms in Truth and Logic (pp. 301–329).

Steinberger, F. (2019). Three Ways in Which Logic Might Be Normative. The Journal of Philosophy, 116, 5–31.

Changing Formatting of Edited Volume Bibliography Entries

1 Answers1