Zotero Quick Tip: Transform Title Text

Have you ever used Zotero to grab a citation from a library or journal database, only to have to retype the title of the article because it’s not capitalized correctly? Or maybe the article has a superfluous space before a colon that you have to manually edit out?

I don’t know about you, but dealing with these nagging little details takes some of the magic out of the otherwise automagical powers of Zotero. A while ago I tweeted my frustration with this problem and asked if there was some way Zotero could automatically reformat lowercase titles into proper title capitalization.

And guess what?

Sheila Brennan, the Associate Director of Public Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (developers of Zotero), wrote back with this quick and useful tip: Right-click in the title field in Zotero and you’ll have an option to transform the text to the title case. This trick will also remove those extra spaces before colons! On a Mac the trick works with a CTRL-click. I’ve tested this trick out on the Zotero Firefox extension and the standalone Zotero, and it works on both.

To recap: transform title capitalization in Zotero by right-clicking (PC) or CTRL-clicking (Mac) in the title field.

big red plastic letters photo courtesy of Flickr user David Salafia / Creative Commons License