How to capitalize the first letter of some words that are usually lower-cases in the headline-style

I’m using EndNote x19.

Certain words, such as “in,” “on,” etc. are usually lower cases in the headline style for title capitalization. However, sometimes they do need to appear as upper cases. For example, the words that I’ve encountered in the paper titles that need to capitalize those words include Lock-In, On-Shelf, (In)Dependence.

There must be a way of including additional rules for capitalization of these special words (I hope!!!), so that these words are capitalized when they appear as the first word after a colon for example. If anyone knows how to include additional rules for capitalization, that would be of a great help!

The worst solution for now for me is to leave the titles as they are if a journal requires a headline style capitalization for its referencing style, and if a journal wants a sentence style, then choose the sentence style. However, the import of the references would sometimes require manual work to change the capitalization, which is at risk of human error, and that’s why I want to find a solution to resolve it once and for all.

A complete irrelevant question: the word “toward” should be capitalized or not in the headline style? I thought it shouldn’t, but my EndNote capitalize it. Am I wrong in thinking it shouldn’t?

Thanks a lot for any input!

In preferences (edit menu in endnote > preferences), you can define words that shouldn’t be changed, so you would add those terms to that list. see below for mine. About toward, this is what a google search revealed: 5 letters or less and it seems to depend on which style guide you are following!

Thank you for trying to help. I know the “do not change cases” function, but unfortunately, the function doesn’t apply to special words, such as “in,” “out,” “on,” etc. are involved, for good reasons too (as most of these words shouldn’t be in upper-cases in headline style anyway). That’s why I’m asking for how to change the rules governing these special words, as they will become upper-cases when they appear as the first word of the title and immidiately after a colon (:).

And thank you for the link to clarify the capitalization of “toward!” Very help!

so you are saying if you enter those as they are - in the table, it doesn’t work? Have you tried. I have used words with mixed case in the past, it respected them?

Yes, I have tried. That was the first thing I tried. It didn’t work. I’m using EndNote x9. Does the version matter?

Even if it worked, it would create another problem, as if I choose to use sentence style, then I wouldn’t want them to be capitalised.