The BMJ & I have the same problem
📅 Sat 22 November 2025 at 05:26 GMT
- But I have 2 more capital letters than they have, so I can't complain too much
I felt frustrated when I noticed a typo – a small “j” rather than a capital “J” – in the title of a new journal I registered. How could the British Library make such a basic mistake? You simply can’t trust anyone to do their job correctly these days. Before I fired off an angry email, I did some digging around in the database of ISSNs1 (which are what ISBNs are for books, but for journals).
It turns out my embryonic journal and I are in great company! Even the behemoth and ancient British Medical Journal is actually, technically, the “British medical journal” (small “m”, small “j”) in the ISSN database. Each country administers their own ISSNs, and the British Library is the UK’s ISSN agency. They have adopted a house style whereby all journal titles are sentence case.2 Who knew?!
Which means they have been exceedingly generous in giving me 3 out of a possible 4 capital letters! In fact, they have handled my journal title application with the utmost care, sensitivity and respect.
They could have simply made it “The balagha corpus journal” as per their rules, and no-one could have complained – not even the British Medical Journal, evidently.
But no – they realised that it is the journal of The Balagha Corpus, where The Balagha Corpus is the proper noun of an entity and therefore must remain capitalised. So they made it “The Balagha Corpus journal”, staying true to their house style, while also respecting the semantic relationships within the proposed title.
There is a beautiful and subtle lesson in English grammar, even in the naming of a journal!
- International Standard Serial Number ↩︎
- i.e. like a sentence, with a capital letter at the start only. ↩︎
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