Prevent conversion to lowercase in bibtex

Question

I am using the style ascelike.bst for my reference list, and it gives me almost what I want. Except it converts everything to lowercase

Vigdor, Jacob (2008). "The economic aftermath of hurricane katrina." The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 22(4): 135-54.

I want titles within quotation marks and capitalised words

Vigdor, Jacob (2008). "The Economic Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina." The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 22(4): 135-54.

Instead of protecting the titles with {} in the bib-file I try to modify the bst-file, the format.title looks like this:

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

Suggestions?

Answer 1

If your bib file already has the correct capitalization: As indicated in this other question, you can change format.title in the bst to:

FUNCTION {format.title}
{ title empty$
{ "" }
{ title }
if$
}

If the capitalization is not correct to begin with, there is not much you can do. As explained here, change.case$ does not support capitalizing the first letter of each word, since this would be problematic (some words like "and" or "the" should not be capitalized). The capitalization styles supported by change.case$ are [source] :

"u" to change to uppercase, "t" to change to lowercase apart the first character and character in {}, and "l" to change to lowercases.