When the title of an article is printed differently in the front/back matter versus the first page, which should be used for citing the article? I wish to cite a research paper by B. L. van der Waerden from 1928 that is titled (very) slightly differently in the front/back matter of the journal versus the first page of the article: in the front/back matter the title is given as &quot;Beweis einer Baudetschen Vermutung&quot; and on the first page of the article it is given with an apostrophe as &quot;Beweis einer Baudet'schen Vermutung&quot;.
My guess (since my German is very rudimentary) is that the apostrophe is a typo because the German language apparently does not use the possessive apostrophe. But, even if the title of a paper contains a typo I would prefer to cite it along with the typo as per the advice in this related post: How to refer to a source with typos in the title?.
However, in this case, I am not even sure which one is the official title of the article since there is a (slightly) different title in the front/back matter. What is the preferred method of citing the article in this scenario?
Admittedly, the difference is not so great that it will cause trouble for anyone looking up this article using either title, but I am interested also in the general case where the difference in the title between the first page and the front/back matter is more drastic than a deviant apostrophe.
Is there a standard practice regarding which one to consider as the &quot;official&quot; title to quote in a citation? If not, what is the preferred method to deal with articles having different titles in this manner?
Without sufficient reputation, I cannot post this as a comment; so here we go in an answer... I apologise!
'Beweis einer Baudetschen Vermutung' is orthographically incorrect, as 'Baudetschen' is an adjective and should therefore be written using a lowercase 'b' as 'baudetschen'. If this adjective, however, is derived from a name, it can be written as 'Baudet'schen' to emphasise it origin from the name 'Baudet'.
We can conclude that the title of the article itself is correct, whilst front and back matter are incorrect. The title of the book 'Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde' does not look German to me (the cover lists Amsterdam and Groningen, two cities in the Netherlands), and indicates that is was not necessarily compiled by editors sufficiently proficient in German.
So this problem is actually not comparable to the potentially related question mentioned by OP and in the comments, as this book has a misspelling solely in its table of content, but not the article itself. Therefore I suggest to just quote the article by its correct title 'Beweis einer Baudet'schen Vermutung' and not to copy the editors' mistake 'Beweis einer Baudetschen Vermutung'.