BibTeX loses capitals when creating .bbl file

Question

Titles of articles I'm about to cite contain uppercase letters and when using BibTeX it converts them in lowercase ones. This happens only in title and only first letter conserves it's case. For example, when I cite article about HF, reader won't know if it is about Hafnium or fluorine acid.

I know that I can fix it manually in .bbl file but I'd like to avoid it, or fix it automatically.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Answer 1

This is not a bug; it's a feature. BibTeX converts all characters in the title to lowercase, with the exception of the first character. If you want to override this, wrap the character(s) in curly brackets, e.g.,

title = "Pascal, {C}, {Java}: were they all conceived in {ETH}?"

Answer 2

You could protect your titles by using additional braces: title = "{About HF}".

Answer 3

The canonical reference for this kind of thing is Nicolas Markey's Tame the BeaST. For your example of HF, enter it as {HF} to keep the capitalisation.

Generally, it's better to only put the braces around the minimum part that needs fixed capitalization. Some publications want all UPPER CASE, some want Title Case, some want Sentence case. So for most flexibility an article about Hafnium and hydrofluoric acid should be entered as title = {The effects of {HF} on {Hf}}

Answer 4

If you do want to change all the bibliography entries then you can modify your style file. Copy it to mybst.bst and then edit the file to modify the function format.title to:

FUNCTION {format.title}
{ 
% title empty$
%    { "" }
%    { title "t" change.case$ }
%  if$
title
}

Then it didn't change the uppercase letters. Save the new file into your documents directory and try it. If it works, then you can move it into the local texmf tree.

Answer 5

As others have noted, lowercase titles is a feature an not a bug, the idea being that the bibliography style is responsible for capitalizing or not title words according to the particular style it implements. However, there are obviously places where this is not what you want, as you have found: acronyms, proper names etc. in titles.

The general rule for solving this problem is to enclose the elements that must always be capitalized in {...}. However, as a rule of thumb, you should always enclose the smallest possible part. For example:

title = "A comparison of {P}ascal, {A}da, and {BASIC}"
title = "A biography of {E. M.} {F}orster"

not

title = "A comparison of {Pascal}, {Ada} and {BASIC}"
title = "A biography of {E. M.} {Forster}"

The reason for not surrounding the whole word in {...} is that the braces will also prevent hyphenation of that word. So it's best just to surround the smallest stretch of a word that needs to remain capiatalized. For proper names, this will generally be the first letter; for acronyms or chemical formulas it will be the whole thing.