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I am writing a thesis in Computer Science. I want to have a chapter there about technologies used, with sections on different packages and libraries I used. (It is quite standard to have a structure like this for implementation thesis at my school.) It makes sense for such section heading to be just the name of the library, e.g. "BioPython".

In case of software library such as "pandas", do I capitalize the first letter for the heading or not?

It seems that pandas library is strictly lowercase in every official source. In the official documentation or on their GitHub page, they have the name lowercase even when it starts a heading.

My question is: Is it alright to have a lowercase name of heading in thesis? Or should I capitalize it to "Pandas" even though the library is never referred to by this version of its name?

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  • “The pandas library” works too.
    – Jon Custer
    Commented Apr 26 at 19:09

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Brand names should follow the capitalization style of the brand. iPhone and eBay are common examples of this in literature.

As pandas is officially written in lowercase, you should refer to it that way as well. Though in order to avoid confusion with members of the Ursidae family 🐼, you should refer to it at least once using a more complete name, such as the one used on the website: "pandas - Python data analysis library".

Also note that pandas has official citation guidelines: https://pandas.pydata.org/about/citing.html

See: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9063/how-do-you-capitalize-a-proper-noun-such-as-iphone for more examples of this.

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    I would love to see a context where "pandas" the library could be plausibly confused with "pandas" the bear.
    – Azor Ahai -him-
    Commented Apr 26 at 23:01
  • @AzorAhai-him- Me too! I'm now imagining a paper announcing the discovery a hidden subspecies of hyper-intelligent pandas who have a love for data science.
    – lfalin
    Commented Apr 27 at 2:44
  • Perhaps there is data pertaining to pandas and data pertaining to grizzlies analyzed in Python and R, and you have the "pandas pandas data" and the "grizzly R data."
    – Azor Ahai -him-
    Commented Apr 27 at 23:58

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