bibtex & capitalization

It seems that most of the default bibtex styles convert all non-first letters in titles to lowercase. This is problematic, since of course many papers have proper nouns (e.g. locations, species, named concepts) in their titles! Rather than go through and attach braces "{}" around all letters that need capitalization preserved, it makes more sense to edit the bibtex style file (*.bst) to preserve the title:

If you prefer to edit the bibtex style (.bst) rather than the bibliography (.bib), you can search for occurences of change.case$ in it. This is the function that capitalizes or title-izes fields that are not people names.

Typically, for the title field, you should find something like title "t" change.case$. Since you want the title unmodified, replace that by just title.

All I needed to do was copy the bibtex style file into the local folder with my tex document, edit it, and re-compile. Voila!

From here.