APA style: title-case for periodical names

[gjuggler]

Hi! I'm a developer for Paperpile, a reference manager using CSL and citeproc-js for formatting citations.

We tend to store journal names in sentence case rather than title case, but some style guides require title casing for journal names. In particular, APA is explicit about this rule, e.g. here and here

I'm wondering if it would make sense to change the apa.csl from this:

<if type="bill legal_case legislation" match="none">
  <text variable="container-title" font-style="italic"/>
</if>

to something like:

<if type="article article-magazine article-newspaper" match="any">
  <text variable="container-title" font-style="italic" text-case="title"/>
</if>
<else-if type="bill legal_case legislation" match="none">
  <text variable="container-title" font-style="italic"/>
</else-if>

Would that not conform more closely to the APA guide?

Rather than make an immediate pull request, I thought I'd post this as an issue since capitalization is a frequently-discussed topic, especially w.r.t. APA styles.

(And as an aside, we'd love to get up and running with any up-to-date test suites for CSL and/or citeproc. The https://github.com/citation-style-language/test-suite looks a little stale though... is https://bitbucket.org/bdarcus/citeproc-test/ the best place to start for a formatting test suite?)

[adam3smith]

I've been cautious about this in the past. My concern are journal titles that might get messed up by automated title casing - I'm thinking mostly of journals that publish in English but have non-English titles, such as "Abhandlungen aus dem Mathematischen Seminar der Universität Hamburg".
That said and especially with PubMed storing journal titles in sentence case, I'd be inclined to go along with this. @rmzelle - thoughts?

As for text fixures - what exactly are you after? The test-suite on github is certainly outdated and either the one at bdarcus's bitbucket page or @fbennett 's one: https://bitbucket.org/fbennett/citeproc-js/src/tip/tests/ would be the place to go. But they just test that the processor works correctly and if you're using citeproc-js anyway I'm not sure why you'd need them - Frank runs them before every release.

[gjuggler]

Thanks Sebastian for the quick reply.

Re: tests, it's mostly that we'd like to be able to determine the root source of any issue that a user reports. Since we're mapping our data model to citeproc's ad-hoc input format, and citeproc-js and CSL are changing all the time, it's helpful to be able to see, run, and potentially add to the set of canonical input & output tests to investigate the expected behavior in a controlled setting. That makes it easier for us to identify whether it's a style definition issue (as in this case), a processor issue, or an issue in our use of citeproc-js. I'll follow up with @fbennett if we have any trouble getting running with the citeproc-js tests.

[gjuggler]

BTW, you hit the nail on the head re: PubMed journal titles. For most scientific styles that use abbreviations this isn't a problem (since available abbreviations tend to be in title case), but APA is a popular style that uses full-length journal names and (in English at least) title case for periodicals.

I understand the issue with journals like the one you mentioned, where forcing capitalization one way or another can be problematic.

My feeling is that in general it would make sense to extend CSL with some sort of "casing protection" syntax, so edge cases like this could be fixed by users without resorting to manually editing a style or giving up in frustration. IMO LaTeX uses the simplest solution already, surrounding any protected substrings with braces. (I see there's been some recent discussion of this on the x-biblio list. I'm not an approved member of the list yet so I can't post there, but I would strongly vote against an HTML-like syntax and in favor of something simple, easily parsed, and specific to protecting casing.)

Or, if the general approach is to avoid using text-case="title" even in styles where it's expected, that would be helpful for programs providing input to CSL processors to know. We can always add some pre-processing or offer convenience functions to users to convert capitalization (as I saw Zotero has done), but we'd rather not duplicate effort or over-process things on the way in to citeproc.

[rmzelle]

@adam3smith, fine with me.

@gjuggler, I've added you as a member to the xbiblio-devel mailing list.

[dwl-sdca]

For English language journal titles, PubMed follows the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR). This mostly means sentence case. The initial letter of proper nouns in the titles are in upper case. Generally, but not always, the first character of a title is in upper case. See, for example, "e-SPEN, the European e-journal of clinical nutrition and metabolism". Non-English titles are cased in the format that is correct in the language of the place where the journal was originally published. The Library of Congress and OCLC follow similar cataloging conventions.

[adam3smith]

I'd accept this as a pull request then. I'll do it myself eventually, too, pull request is likely going to be faster.

[adam3smith]

closing this since - @gjuggler 's corresponding pull request has been merged. The larger discussion about escaping should continue on xbiblio (where it started already)