change title to sentence case with capital after colon?

nicka · Post by **nicka** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 5:52 pm

Does anyone have any idea how I can change the case of the title field for all references so that I get a capital at the beginning _and_ after any colon?

i.e. I want a global change which achieves this:
"Being polite is a handicap: Towards a game theoretical analysis of polite linguistic behaviour"

not what I get from sentence case:
"Being polite is a handicap: towards a game theoretical analysis of polite linguistic behaviour"

and not title case:
"Being Polite Is A Handicap: Towards A Game Theoretical Analysis Of Polite Linguistic Behaviour"

That is, I have some titles currently in each of these forms, but I want them all like the first one.

Thanks.

Post by **Jon** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 6:12 pm

There is no automatic method to achieve this. My guess is that it would be relatively simple to do it by hand -- do a Find for references containing a colon in the Title field (you must search for "characters", not "beginning with" or "whole words"), then change the case of the word following the colon. Unless you specialize in compound titles, this probably wouldn't take very long. (You can further refine this search to Book Types, if those are the only ones you want to change).

Jon
Sonny Software

nicka · Post by **nicka** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 6:26 pm

Thanks for the super-quick answer. I'm afraid I have 167 titles with colons for journal articles alone. Colons in titles appear to be rather common in the fields I study.

Jon, have you ever thought about implementing REGEX replace to go with the excellent REGEX find?

Jon and others: Should changing to sentence case put a capital after colons as well as after a full-stop (period)? I'm genuinely not sure whether there is a convention for this.

Post by **Jon** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 6:31 pm

nicka wrote:Jon, have you ever thought about implementing REGEX replace to go with the excellent REGEX find?

I had thought of this, but only briefly. It seemed that the danger of destroying ones database (it is not undoable, and Bookends saves changes as they are made) outweighed the possible benefits.

Jon and others: Should changing to sentence case put a capital after colons as well as after a full-stop (period)? I'm genuinely not sure whether there is a convention for this.

In my experience, it is lowercase after the colon. But that ma be flexible and differ between journals and conventions. I'd like to hear what others know about this as well.

Jon
Sonny Software

nicka · Post by **nicka** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 7:24 pm

Nothing definitive, but on a page about APA citations I found this:

"Notice that only the first letter of the article's title is capitalized. However, if there is a colon in the article's title, the first letter to follow the colon should also be capitalized."

The same advice is given there for periodical articles, books and book chapters.

I'll try to check the APA manual at a library later in the week.

ozean · Post by **ozean** » Tue Mar 06, 2007 7:31 am

Having a capital letter after a colon is also a common requirement in Germany.

Post by **Jon** » Tue Mar 06, 2007 9:07 am

Hm, upon examination I see that Bookends does this already if you tell it to ouput titles in Sentence case!

Make sure there is only one space after the colon. Bookends will not do this if there are two spaces.

Jon
Sonny Software

nicka · Post by **nicka** » Tue Mar 06, 2007 2:43 pm

What Jon just said is the key to this. After some email corresponence with Jon I see that there was no need to try to get the titles in right format with Global Change... > Change Case because you can leave them formatted however they were originally input and edit the reference format to produce Sentence case or Title case. (See pp. 123-4 of the User Guide).

To clarify: Global Change... > Change Case > Sentence Case for Title field produces references with titles with a capital only after a full-stop (period).

Editing the reference type to output sentence case for titles produces output with capital letters after full-stops and after colons, as Jon's previous post says.

I hope that is clear, and helps.

Post by **Jon** » Tue Mar 06, 2007 3:13 pm

In the next update, Global Change -> Change Case will also convert the letter after a colon to uppercase.

Jon
Sonny Software

bluloo · Post by **bluloo** » Tue Mar 06, 2007 9:26 pm

APA 5th edition considers the text that follows a colon, in an article's title, to be a subtitle. The first letters of the first words in a title and a subtitle are capitalized.

Ergo, there is a capital letter used in the first word after the colon for APA as well.