How is "title case" defined in bibtex? Which is the list of words not to capitalize, and in which file is it defined? Is it possible to change it? I checked the .bst file, but apparently it's delegated to a function change.case whose definition I cannot find.
[Tex/LaTex] Implementation of “Title Case” in Bibtex
bibtexcapitalization
Related Solutions
Let us assume you have the following files/setup:
mybibstyle.bstmybibliography.bib
Create a file myfile.aux containing the following:
\relax
\citation{*}
\bibstyle{mybibstyle}
\bibdata{mybibliography}
This is literally the output from compiling the following minimal example:
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\bibliographystyle{mybibstyle}
\bibliography{mybibliography}
\end{document}
Now run
bibtex myfile
which reads mybibliography.bib, myfile.aux and mybibstyle.bst and creates the file myfile.bbl containing the thebibliography environment based on mybibstyle.bst.
Too long for a comment.
The following example uses tufte.bst, which shows that the style does not change the capitalization of the title of an article:
\begin{filecontents*}{test-tufte.bib}
@article{a,
title={The Title of an Article},
author={John Doe},
journal={The Journal Name},
year=2016
}
@book{b,
title={The Title of a Book},
author={Ute Mustermann},
publisher={Publisher},
year=2016,
}
\end{filecontents*}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[numbers]{natbib}
\begin{document}
\cite{a, b}
\bibliography{test-tufte}
\bibliographystyle{tufte}
\end{document}
Best Answer
As far as I am aware, there is no BibTeX (nor any
biblatex) style that implements a "convert to title case" macro/function (there was a question a while back on how to achieve this withbiblatex, the answer shows a way to get started with such a macro inbiblatexwith Biber).There is, however, a function to turn titles into sentence case (uppercase first letter of the first word, rest lowercased). It depends on the style whether or not this function is used. If your style applies sentence casing you will probably find a line like this in the
.bstfiletitle "t" change.case$.So the rules is to give the titles in Title Case in the
.bibfile and have the bibliography style convert them to Sentence case if desired (cf. What is the proper casing to use when storing titles in the bibliography database?).Generally then, titles in
.bibfiles should always be given in title case, where additionally words that always have to be capitalised in a certain way (names, acronyms, formulae etc.) are enclosed in curly braces{}.Example
See also BibTeX loses capitals when creating .bbl file, especially Alexis' answer.