Titles - capitalisation

There is one rule about capital letters in the titles of books or other works such as films, paintings, plays, and other resources in normal academic English writing: put the first letter of any form word in upper case. (Form words are in essence nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.) Function words - the 'small' words like 'the', 'of' and so on - are not normally capitalised.

This rule holds good in most academic writing. It is varied in various special forms, such as library catalogues, bibliographies and booklists. Those who work with foreign languages may well wish to use the foreign forms of the title when citing them; but the safest way for those not familiar with the foreign conventions is to apply the English rules. That way, you may appear xenophobic; but otherwise you risk error, and embarrassment of a different kind. Remember AWE's second principle of Referencing: Make it possible for your reader to find and check any source you have mentioned, and you will not go seriously wrong. If the foreign title is written in a foreign writing system like Chinese or Arabic, you should add a transliteration for the benefit of readers who cannot read that writing.

A separate convention often applies to subtitles. These should normally be written with a colon after the main title, and with no capitalisation except for proper nouns, which should be marked in the usual way.

You may also want to see Titles and Titles - italicisation.