Biblatex Customizations

• latex
• biblatex
• bibliography

Biblatex: citenum command, papers under preparation, and no ISBN/ISSN if DOI present

For my PhD thesis I used biblatex with the biber backend to generate the citations and bibliography automatically in the “numeric” style.

I encountered three small problems:

1. The \citenum command from natbib (to have in-text citations like In Ref. 3) does not exist in biblatex
2. The bibliography style for @article prefixes the journal title with “In: “, but I have some papers under preparation that do not have a journal title set.
3. Because I generated most of the bib entries automatically with zotero, often both ISBN/ISSN and DOI are set. I don’t want to lengthen the bibliography entries by including both, but by default you can only remove the identifiers unconditionally.

adding a citenum command

A simple implementation of the \citenum command is found in this StackExchange answer:

\DeclareCiteCommand{\citenum}%
  {\usebibmacro{cite:init}%
   \usebibmacro{prenote}}
  {\usebibmacro{citeindex}%
   \usebibmacro{cite:comp}}
  {}
  {\usebibmacro{cite:dump}%
   \usebibmacro{postnote}}

Removing the “In :” prefix for papers under preparation

The numeric biblatex style for @article entries looks like this (simplified):

First1 Last1, First2 Last2, and First3 Last3. “Title of paper.” In: Journal title vol.issue (year)

I had some papers that were under preparation at the time of finishing the thesis that I wanted to include nevertheless. Using a @article entry without journal information and date = {under preparation} does not work out of the box: the prefix In: is added even if no journal title is set.

To remove it, the in: command is modified:

\renewbibmacro*{in:}{
  \iffieldundef{journaltitle}
    {}
    {\bibstring{in}\printunit{\intitlepunct}}
}

Show ISBN/ISSN only if DOI is not set

\AtEveryBibitem{
  \iffieldundef{doi}
    {}
    {\clearfield{issn}%
     \clearfield{isbn}}%
}