Q. I write scientific review articles for a company. When I use ZoteroBib to cite sources in my articles, I see that scientific names for organisms in the titles that I add to my bibliography are not italicized, even though I chose “Chicago Manual of Style 18th edition” as the style. Should I italicize the scientific names in my article’s bibliography, or is ZoteroBib correct?
A. You should apply any italics as they appear in the title of the source itself.
For example, if you paste the URL for a random article in The Journal of Infectious Diseases into ZoteroBib (a scaled-down, browser-based version of Zotero, the popular open-source citation management program) and choose Chicago style, you’ll get the following bibliography entry:
Gruenberg, Maria, Natalie E. Hofmann, Elma Nate, et al. “qRT-PCR versus IFA-Based Quantification of Male and Female Gametocytes in Low-Density Plasmodium Falciparum Infections and Their Relevance for Transmission.” The Journal of Infectious Diseases 221, no. 4 (2020): 598–607. https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiz420.
That’s pretty good, but it should be “Plasmodium falciparum” (in italics and with a lowercase f); “versus” should have a capital V (as a preposition of more than four letters); and the initial The in the title of the journal may be dropped in source citations.
ZoteroBib and especially Zotero excel at collecting and organizing source citations; no author should be without such tools. But the automated style rules that programs like these apply aren’t perfect. And the metadata (the structured bibliographic data collected by these programs from publishers’ and booksellers’ websites) isn’t either. Be prepared to edit the info—preferably the moment you collect it, so you don’t have to return to the source later on.