4.29 Publications and works of art

In English titles of books, articles, periodicals, newspapers, plays, operas and long musical compositions and recordings, poems, paintings, sculptures and motion pictures, capitalize all words except articles, conjunctions of fewer than four letters, and prepositions of fewer than four letters. These exceptions are also capitalized when they immediately follow a period, colon or dash within a title and when they are the first or last word in a title:

• book
  • Virginia Woolf: A Biography
• book
  • Under the Volcano
• book
  • To Kill a Mockingbird
• book
  • How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
• painting
  • Rain in the North Country
• film
  • Goin’ Down the Road
• opera
  • The Magic Flute

Words that are normally prepositions are capitalized when they help form another part of speech:

• Getting By While Getting On
• Guide to On-Reserve Housing

In short titles, capitalize words that would be capitalized in full titles:

• Appleton’s General Guide to the United States and Canada, Illustrated With Railway Maps, Plans of Cities, and Table of Railway and Steamboat Fares, for the Year 1891 (full title)
• Appleton’s Guide for 1891 (short form)
• I read about it in the News.

Even if some words appear in all capital letters on the title page, capitalize only initial letters, except in specialized bibliographies that must reflect the original typography.

Titles of ancient manuscripts are capitalized, even if the titles were assigned in modern times:

• the Dead Sea Scrolls
• Codex Alexandrinus

See the Appendix for capitalization of titles in French.

In titles containing hyphenated compounds, always capitalize the first element. Capitalize the second element if it is a proper noun or proper adjective or if it is as important as the first element:

• A History of Eighteenth-Century Literature
• Anti-Americanism in Latin America

9.08 Compiling a bibliographic entry

(a) Books

A bibliographic entry for a book should generally comprise the following:

• Author’s name (one or several authors; corporate author; editor or compiler, if there is no author; translator or illustrator, if either is the focus of the study)
• Title (includes title and subtitle)
• Secondary responsibility (includes editor, translator, compiler, preface writer, etc.)
• Edition (other than the first)
• Publication data (place of publication, publisher, date)

These components are separated by periods and a space, and the second and subsequent lines of an entry are indented.

(b) Articles

An entry for an article in a periodical should contain the following:

• Author’s name
• Title of the article
• Name of the periodical
• Volume and issue number (if any)
• Date
• Page number(s) (inclusive)

The article title is enclosed in quotation marks and followed by a period inside the closing quotation marks. Note that the date is placed in parentheses and no comma separates it from the volume or issue number. In accordance with International Standard ISO 690: 1987, the abbreviation p. or pp. may be omitted, and a colon then precedes the page number(s). However, if the volume number has not been given, the abbreviation is used and is preceded by a comma:

• Moore, Jason. "Understanding Old Age." Popular Medicine 7, 3 (August 1991): 210–14.
• Luna, James. "Allow Me to Introduce Myself: The Performance Art of James Luna." Canadian Theatre Review 68 (Fall 1991), pp. 46–7.

(c) Specialized periodicals

Bibliographic, footnote and endnote entries for articles in specialized periodicals in the natural, applied and social sciences are generally presented as follows:

• Only the first word in the article title and proper nouns and their derivatives are capitalized.
• Since most scientific publications use the author-date system in references, the date of publication is placed directly after or below the author’s name.
• No quotation marks are used for the title of the article.
• The title of the publication is invariably abbreviated and in most cases not italicized.
• The volume or issue number is followed by a colon, and p. or pp. is not used.

  Ivanovic, M., and K. Higita. 1991. Advances in cellular and development biology. Can. J. Biochem. 125: 539–41.

Note the use of periods with the abbreviations.

See 9.25 In-text notes for the author-date system and 9.29 Common abbreviations in notes and bibliographies for title abbreviations.

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