With the fantastic collaboration of Athabasca University faculty I have been investigating the failure of Zotero to accurately generate APA 6th Ed. format.  In addition, Zotero can also fail to retrieve DOI that resolves easily from DOI.org

This begs the question of accuracy for any citation application.  Many sites (i.e., http://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/infolib/2012/10/29/zotero-versus-mendeley-2/) evaluate features but nothing on accuracy of output.

A simple test reveals immediately the problem.

ISBN and DOI capitalization issues for Textbooks and Journal articles.
Example
ISBN
978-1-4129-9530-6
Qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five approaches ...

Correct APA is to have capitalization of > Choosing <

My discussion can be found at http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/28050?page=1#Item_5 and the responses to the discussion indicate bad news for anyone who expects accuracy.  If the MS Word application can adjust capitalization then a correct transformation in a citation application should be able to parse and capitalize output where necessary.

What I would like to see is research on the accuracy of citation applications in generating correct formatting from poorly formed data fields.

Regardless of the citation application, if the enduser has to enter preformatted data, then how is this any different from entering the sum manually in a spreadsheet?

Weren't computers suppose to make our lives easier???