By ET

I type my BiBTeX entries carefully, but different journals may have different requirements for capitalizing paper titles.

Some would like a plain format, like
Some, Author, 2009, “Capitalizing BibTeX titles: A simple tool,” Science, 110(1), 1-20.

Some Bibtex class files may automatically lowercase all words after the first, so the title looks like:
“Capitalizing bibtex titles: a simple tool,”

To make the title correct, we can add curly brackets, and change the title as:
“Capitalizing {B}ib{T}e{X} titles: {A} simple tool,”

This helps to address the issue, but what if a journal requires all first Characters to be capitalized? like this:
“Capitalizing BibTeX Titles: A Simple Tool,”

It is not hard to write a program to capitalize all words, but then there are complications, like the following case:
“Capitalizing BibTeX titles for Some Journals: A Simple and Intuitive Tool,”

In the above example, “for”, and “and” should not be capitalized.

In another example,
“Capitalizing BibTeX titles for Some Journals: Vote For a Solution,”

The second “For” should be capitalized, but “a” should not be capitalized.

So some intelligence is needed to convert the titles. That’s why I wrote this tool that correctly capitalize the titles.

The location of the tool is: http://blog.mikezhang.com/dcolumn/bibcapital.cgi.

There are some example entries in the box, just click “submit”, see how it works.

To process your file, simply copy and paste into and from this text box.

Again, this tool is offered as is. If you find it useful, that’s great. If you have problems with it, please talk to my friend Feng Zhu, he helped me to debug this tool, I’m going to hold him responsible for additional bugs.

By ET This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 2:24 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.