APA subtitle capitalization with a CSL JSON bibliography

[SmallHollow]

I'm using Zotero 7.0.11 + Better BibTeX 7.05 to create a CSL JSON bibliography that I use with Pandoc 3.6.2 to generate PDFs with APA 7th ed citations and a bibliography. I have entered the titles into Zotero in sentence case, separating the title and subtitle with a colon as recommended in Zotero knowledge base. Everything works perfectly except the following tiny detail.

I'm using the APA style, where the subtitle is capitalized. For example, "Thinking in jazz: the infinite art of improvisation" should become "Thinking in jazz: The infinite art of improvisation". However, the subtitle is not capitalized and the output remains in the same format as I've entered it into Zotero (perhaps this is intentional?)

Is it possible to automatically capitalize the subtitle in the Pandoc process? Or should I edit my database?

[badumont]

CSL does not support that: you can either write a Lua filter or edit your database.

[jgm]

Can't you just capitalize 'The' in the title you enter in Zotero?

[SmallHollow]

That works, of course. The only problem is having to manually update the 1000+ items I have in my Zotero database, although not all of them have subtitles to worry about (I have a subset of ca. 350 items in my current Pandoc CSL JSON bibliography).

I had followed Zotero's instructions to enter the titles in lowercase, since "Zotero will automatically capitalize the subtitle for styles that require it" (from the link in my original post), and Zotero does that if I create the APA bibliography straight from it (e.g. RTF). I wasn't aware that once it's converted to CSL JSON (via Better BibTeX), it's no longer possible to get the APA capital subtitle in Pandoc, unless I do a Lua filter like suggested by @badumont.

Anyway, it seems to be easiest just to update the whole bibliography manually in Zotero. In fact, with all the time I've spent trying to figure this out, it'd be done by now :-)

[jpcirrus]

I did this some years ago by making a copy of the Zotero database and updated the filtered records using SQL. Found the commands on SE and the whole process took less than 10 minutes.

[badumont]

I had followed Zotero's instructions to enter the titles in lowercase, since "Zotero will automatically capitalize the subtitle for styles that require it" (from the link in my original post), and Zotero does that if I create the APA bibliography straight from it (e.g. RTF). I wasn't aware that once it's converted to CSL (via Better BibTeX), it's no longer possible to get the APA capital subtitle in Pandoc, unless I do a Lua filter like suggested by @badumont.

Unfortunately, some of the features Zotero provides are absent from the CSL specification (which it is supposed to implement), although they are recommendable ones. There is not even a concept of subtitle in the CSL specification (https://docs.citationstyles.org/en/v1.0.2/specification.html)! Instead of using a Lua filter, which would require to parse the formatted bibliography produced by Pandoc, you could process your bibliography with Javascript directly in Zotero. It may be worth for 300+ items. Here is the documentation: https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/client_coding/javascript_api

[denismaier]

Another option might be to use jq

[denismaier]

Also, Zotero BBT supports postprocessing with postscripts. https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/exporting/scripting/index.html

[SmallHollow]

Thank you everyone for your suggestions!

In sum, the options include:

1. Zotero database modification
   a. Edit the Zotero database manually.
   b. Modify the Zotero database with SQL or with Zotero's JavaScript API.
2. Zotero JSON export post-processing with Better BibTeX postscripts.
3. Exported JSON processing with jq.
4. Processing the bibliography with Pandoc Lua filter.

Currently the BBT postscript (or perhaps jq) seems like the choice I'm going to investigate further.

[TomBener]

By exporting as BibTeX/BibLaTeX instead of CSL JSON in Better BibTeX for Zotero, you can avoid the APA subtitle capitalization issue.

Considering the following example:

@book{albertus2015,
  title = {Autocracy and redistribution: the politics of land reform},
  shorttitle = {Autocracy and redistribution},
  author = {Albertus, Michael},
  date = {2015},
  publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
  location = {New York},
  doi = {10.1017/CBO9781316227107}
}

Copying the BibLaTeX entry above and then run the command (macOS):

pbpaste | pandoc -f biblatex -t csljson

The output is:

[
  {
    "DOI": "10.1017/CBO9781316227107",
    "author": [
      {
        "family": "Albertus",
        "given": "Michael"
      }
    ],
    "id": "albertus2015",
    "issued": {
      "date-parts": [
        [
          2015
        ]
      ]
    },
    "publisher": "Cambridge University Press",
    "publisher-place": "New York",
    "title": "Autocracy and redistribution: The politics of land reform",
    "title-short": "Autocracy and redistribution",
    "type": "book"
  }
]

You can see it converts the politics of land reform to The politics of land reform, which is desired in APA.

[denismaier]

Interesting, but should that really be happening?