Capitalization

In the past, the common practice in indexing was to capitalize all leading terms in main headings but to capitalize leading terms in subheadings only if was absolutely necessary to do so. That is no longer common practice.

Today, style guidelines from most publishers call for minimal capitalization in both main headings and in subheadings. Minimal capitalization makes it easier to distinguish names from subjects in integrated indexes and to distinguish among homographs. For example:

The advantages of minimalization grow as the size of the index grows.

Guidelines for capitalization:

• Check with your publisher first. It may have strict guidelines for capitalization.
• Capitalize only proper names, whether in headings or subheadings.
• Capitalize the names of software and other products as the vendor does.
• If alternative capitalizations are common, as in the case of Unix and UNIX, follow the author's lead, if the author is consistent. If the author is not consistent, choose one and stick with it.
• If chapter headings or Latin titles of books are used as headings, capitalize only the first word.
• Use qualifiers, not capitalization, to distinguish among homographs with uppercase letters inside a lowercase sequence. For example:

  MacPherson, C. B. (poet) Macpherson, C. B. (political scientist)

  Qualifiers are needed in this case because uppercase and lowercase letters have equal value during alphabetization.

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