Quoted title in title: sentence case or title case?

[Emiliano Heyns]

When citing eg 

Rigor mortis: a response to Nilsson's "Logic and Artificial Intelligence". 

Does citeproc expect the quoted inner title to be title-cased or sentence-cased? 

[Dan Stillman]

It's not a question of what the processor expects, just of what the output should be according to the style guide. As explained on Sentence Casing, because of the proper-noun problem, CSL styles as written don't sentence-case anything — for styles that require sentence case, they just use the title as entered.

I'd assume the desired output here in a sentence-casing style would be `Rigor mortis: a response to Nilsson's "Logic and artificial intelligence"` (and that's what ScienceDirect shows), so that's what should be stored in the title field.

If this is about your sentence-casing function, though, I'm not sure what the relevance is. As with proper nouns, if a string comes in title-cased, I don't see how your function could know that "Nilsson" is a proper rather than common noun or that "Logic" is the beginning of a title rather than just a quoted string. It's just something users will need to correct.

[Emiliano Heyns]

This is indeed about the sentence case function - I know there's no way to get it right and that the user should always do touch up, the question is what saves the user the most effort. 

[Dan Stillman]

On 8/8/23 6:48 AM, Emiliano Heyns wrote:
> This is indeed about the sentence case function - I know there's no
> way to get it right and that the user should always do touch up, the
> question is what saves the user the most effort.

Since there's no way to know, and I don't think there's any particular
reason to think a quoted title is more common than a quoted string, the
only option is to lowercase. Lowercasing is the default behavior when
sentence-casing, so it's by definition not the wrong behavior, even if
the result needs to be corrected. Going out of our way to leave
something capitalized when we don't have any way of knowing if that's
correct is just introducing unpredictability for the user. I would be
much more annoyed to have to manually fix something that the computer
guessed at and got wrong than to manually fix something that the
computer didn't have any realistic way of assessing (unless it was an
LLM, which is the actual way to do this with a high degree of accuracy).

[Emiliano Heyns]

So should I remove the quoted-protection from the PR then? 

[Emiliano Heyns]

Does that also mean that items with quoted tittles would have to be hand-edited in Zotero before generating a bibliography depending on the chosen citation style? 

[Dan Stillman]

On 8/8/23 10:50 AM, Emiliano Heyns wrote:
> So should I remove the quoted-protection from the PR then?

Yes. And to look at the examples from the tests, the first one might
happen to be correct (if we think that "Turing Test++" is a proper
noun), but the second one is definitely incorrect:

>   "Simulated Penetration Testing: From \"Dijkstra\" to \"Turing
> Test++\"": "Simulated penetration testing: from \"Dijkstra\" to
> \"Turing Test++\"",
>   "The Metric-FF Planning System: Translating \"Ignoring Delete
> Lists\" to Numeric State Variables": "The metric-FF planning system:
> translating \"Ignoring Delete Lists\" to numeric state variables",

"ignoring delete lists" isn't a proper noun and shouldn't be capitalized.

[Dan Stillman]

On 8/8/23 10:54 AM, Emiliano Heyns wrote:
> Does that also mean that items with quoted tittles would have to be
> hand-edited in Zotero before generating a bibliography depending on
> the chosen citation style?

No, why? They just need to be stored in proper sentence case.

[Emiliano Heyns]

I think I just misunderstood. I'll take the quoted parts out.