Biblatex: submitting to a journal

Question

Suppose that I moved from BibTeX to biblatex. With BibTeX I just copied the content of .bbl file into final version of my paper before submitting it to a journal. What should I do at same stage having .bbl file produced by biblatex? It is of quite different format.

Answer 1

For journal submission, I'm afraid my answer would be 'do not use biblatex'. The bibliography is generated at the LaTeX end by biblatex, and so it is not possible to 'paste in the formatted result'. Most journals want you to either do this or use their own BibTeX style, so biblatex is a bad choice. (This is a shame, but unless/until the journals update their workflows that is how it is.)

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One point to note in particular is that you cannot be sure of the package or engine availability on journal systems. For example, the American Chemical Society do not have the e-TeX extensions available on their servers (at the time of writing). These were finalised in 1999, so the time lag is significant. biblatex requires e-TeX, so it would be impossible to use if for a submission to the ACS.

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A second area to bear in mind is journal work flows. Depending on the journal, your LaTeX source may be converted into some other format for publishing. To do that, the publisher may use additional data written to the .bbl file (for example the data repeated in an XML 'comment') or some form of .bbl parser to convert the bibliography. That will not work with biblatex unless they have set up their workflow to deal with it.

Answer 2

it is also possible, but not so easy as with bibtex. When you finished your document write into the preamble after the already existing biblatex definition:

\documentclass{...}
...
\usepackage[style=numeric-verb]{biblatex}% change it for your needs 
\bibliography{examples}
%-------------- start insert modified commands ------------------
\makeatletter
\def\blx@bblfile@biber{%
  \blx@secinit
  \begingroup
  \blx@bblstart
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%
%% copy here the contents of the created bbl file
%
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
  \blx@bblend
  \endgroup
  \csnumgdef{blx@labelnumber@\the\c@refsection}{0}}
\makeatother
%-------------- end insert modified commands ------------------
...
\begin{document}
...
\printbibliography
\end{document}

the only difference is that \printbibliography now takes the contents of the bib not from the external file but from the inserted bbl contents.

If you run bibtex instead of biber (btw: biber is the better choice) then you have to use it in this way:

\usepackage[...,backend=bibtex]{biblatex}
....
\def\blx@bblfile@bibtex{% instead of ...\blx@bblfile@@biber
  \blx@secinit
  \begingroup
  \blx@bblstart
    %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
    %
    %% copy here the contents of the created bbl file
    %
    %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
  \blx@bblend
  \endgroup
  \csnumgdef{blx@labelnumber@\the\c@refsection}{0}%
  \iftoggle{blx@reencode}{\blx@reencode}{}}

Pay attention that you do not insert the last line of the bblfile which is the command \endinput. This one should be deleted or commented out.