Different editorial styles require different casing of titles in their references. While AMA style formats article titles using sentence case, Chicago style prefers title case (also known as headline case). Edifix will insert a warning if an article title* appears to be in title case for the following editorial styles:
- AMA
- APA 6th edition
- CSE
- ICMJE (Vancouver)
A typical title-case warning looks like this:
2. Baron RM, Kenny DA. The Moderator-Mediator Variable Distinction in Social Psychological Research: Conceptual, Strategic, and Statistical Considerations. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1986;51:1173-1182.
The reference title appears to be set in title case rather than sentence case (in reference 2 "Baron, Kenny, 1986").
Currently, Edifix is unable to warn on incorrect uses of sentence case when a title should be in title case, nor can Edifix automatically correct incorrectly or inconsistently cased titles. Because article titles can contain proper nouns that must always be uppercase -- and, occasionally, nouns that should always begin with a lowercase letter, such as rDNA -- developing the tools to recognize and correct article title casing is tricky business, let alone carefully converting titles from one case to another! The warnings that Edifix inserts are designed to help a careful human eye identify and manually adjust the casing of article titles as appropriate.
There's one exception where Edifix does correct case: The first letter of the first word following a colon (i.e., the first word of a subtitle) will be corrected to upper or lower case according to your chosen style.
After you've Edifixed your references, here's a helpful tip: to quickly convert casing in MS Word, use Shift+F3, which toggles the case of the selected text.
*Edifix is currently unable to insert a warning for sentence-case chapter titles and book titles.