a bib style to capitalize book titles but not paper titles

Question

I've heard that title capitalization in bibliography is the bibliography style's role (the bst file). Is there a bibliography style file that capitalizes book titles but not paper titles? For example, a paper title should be like

Hello world and hello kitty

a book title should be like

Hello World and Hello Kitty

---

bib style plain.bst doesn't seem to capitalize book titles. A minimal example:

minbib.tex

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}

See \cite{book1}.

\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{min}
\end{document}

min.bib

@book{book1,
    AUTHOR = {Petersen, K.},
     TITLE = {Ergodic theory},
 PUBLISHER = {Cambridge University Press},
      YEAR = 1989,
}

The book title in the dvi output is "Ergodic theory", not "Ergodic Theory".

Answer 1

We could probably do with some more information here! What style do you want everything else in? There are lots of variables to how bibliographies are formatted.

Answer 2

I've checked this against the contents of the plain.bst file, rather thanrelying on dimly recalled assertions about what bibtex does, as per the post of mine I deleted... plain.bst treats titles in one of two ways, using the functions it defines, first, format.title, used, e.g., for @article, which lowercases, and then format.btitle, used for @book, which puts the title in emphasis without touching the capitalisation.

Rules for capitalising titles are complex, complex enough that one can't expect a .bst file to completely automate it. For example, Chicago Manual of Style says one should "Lowercase prepositions, regardless of length" with a list of examples. But prepositionhood is a semantic role, that is syntactically generative: CMoS gives as an example preposition "according to". And one of the exceptions is to capitalise when the preposition is stressed: e.g., in "Alice Through the Looking Glass", where stress isn't even semantic, but a pragmatic property of the word. So it's not the bst's role.

So the Right Thing is to put title strings in title case, protecting the capitalisation of proper names with {}s (e.g., From {B}rouwer to {H}ilbert). Do this with articles too, since some reflist styles, e.g., MLA, put article titles into title case, but most scientif styles lowercase them.

plain.bst gets one thing wrong: for @article, it does not consider colons, which are used to indicate subtitles. So protect the capital letter after colons.

Answer 3

There is a tool to generate custom bib-styles, makebst.tex. When I run it as

latex /usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/custom-bib/makebst.tex

it asks a lot of questions, and in particular, it allows to select capitalization of article titles:

CAPITALIZATION OF ARTICLE TITLE:
(*) Sentence style (capitalize first word and those in braces)
(t) Title style (just as in bib entry)
  Select:

\ans=t 
  You have selected: Title style

There is no such option for book titles though... But even in this case “Title” style means only “just as in bib entry”. So probably you need to capitalize titles manually.