The Issue:
EndNote currently offers three title capitalization options: Leave titles as entered, Headline style capitalization, and Sentence style capitalization. While the Change Case preference list allows users to protect specific words globally, this creates a problem when the same word requires different capitalization depending on context.
For example, the word “process” may appear in a reference title as a common English word (e.g., “A process for evaluating outcomes”) and also as a proper name requiring all-caps (e.g., “The PROCESS macro for SPSS”). Adding “PROCESS” to the Change Case list protects it globally, meaning the common word “process” would also be incorrectly rendered in all caps across all references.
The Feature Requested:
I would like to request a mechanism to protect the capitalization of specific words within individual reference fields, without affecting the same word in other references. This could be implemented in one of the following ways:
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Curly brace support: Adopt a BibTeX-style convention where wrapping a word in curly braces (e.g., {PROCESS}) in the title field instructs EndNote to preserve its exact capitalization in that reference only, regardless of the global capitalization style applied.
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Inline field-level formatting flag: Introduce a way to tag individual words within a title field as “capitalization-protected,” similar to how character-level formatting (e.g., italics) is currently supported within fields.
Why This Matters:
This limitation affects researchers across many disciplines who cite software, macros, acronyms, gene names, chemical compounds, or other proper nouns that share spelling with common words. The current workaround — setting capitalization to “Leave titles as entered” — sacrifices the flexibility of automatic capitalization formatting across the entire library, which is impractical for large reference libraries or workflows requiring multiple output styles.
Thank you for considering this enhancement. I believe it would meaningfully improve EndNote’s utility for a wide range of users.