Put parentheses around year in citation

Question

I have the following Latex code, where I use biber and chicago style for citations:

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[english,ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[authordate,bibencoding=auto,strict,backend=biber]{biblatex-chicago}
\selectlanguage{ngerman}

\bibliography{bibliography}

\begin{document}

    \cite{Herlocker2004}

    \newpage

    \printbibliography
\end{document} 

And this bibliography.bib:

@article{Herlocker2004,
author = {Herlocker, Jonathan L. and Konstan, Joseph a. and Terveen, Loren G. and Riedl, John T.},
journal = {ACM Transactions on Information Systems},
month = jan,
number = {1},
pages = {5--53},
title = {{Evaluating collaborative filtering recommender systems}},
volume = {22},
year = {2004}
}

This produces

Herlocker u.a. 2004

But I want to put the year in brackets, and replace the german u.a. with et al., so that it looks like this

Herlocker et al. (2004)

Is there any way to format my citations like this?

Answer 1

Here's my suggestion. I added the natbib option for biblatex. This allows you to use the citation commands \citep (whole citation in parentheses) and \citet (only the year is in parentheses). I then redefined the andothers bibliography string for German, like so

\DefineBibliographyStrings{german}{%
  andothers = {et al.},
}

I'd recommend you use the command \addbibresource in the preamble, instead of \bibliography which is legacy (see biblatex manual for v.2.5, p.82).

My suggestion for your working example then becomes

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@article{Herlocker2004,
author = {Herlocker, Jonathan L. and Konstan, Joseph a. and Terveen, Loren G. and Riedl, John T.},
journal = {ACM Transactions on Information Systems},
month = jan,
number = {1},
pages = {5--53},
title = {{Evaluating collaborative filtering recommender systems}},
volume = {22},
year = {2004}
}

\end{filecontents*}

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[english,ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[authordate,bibencoding=auto,strict,backend=biber,natbib]{biblatex-chicago}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\DefineBibliographyStrings{german}{%
  andothers = {et al.},
}


\selectlanguage{ngerman}


\begin{document}

    \citet{Herlocker2004}

    \printbibliography
\end{document}

Answer 2

Here is how to wrap the year in brackets and avoiding issues with an ibid style.

Specifying the natbib option and using the citet command (as stated in the accepted answer) doesn't work as expected when using an ibid style.

Consider the following:

\documentclass[paper=a4]{scrreprt}
\usepackage[style=authoryear-ibid]{biblatex}
\begin{document}

    \cite[21]{keyxyz}
    % outputs: someauthor (2003, p. 21)
   \citet[23]{keyxyz}
    % outputs: someauthor (ibid., p.23) <-- that's fine
   \citet{keyxyz}
    % outputs: someauthor (ibid.) <-- the isssue:
    % what if you want to refer to the authors work as a whole, without
    % referencing the page number as well (as ibid usually implies)?

\end{document}

A quick workaround would be:

\documentclass[paper=a4]{scrreprt}
\usepackage[style=authoryear-ibid]{biblatex}

\newcommand{\citeauthorandyear}[2][]{
   \citeauthor{#2} (\citeyear[#1]{#2})
}

\begin{document}

    \cite[21]{keyxyz}
    % outputs: someauthor (2003, p. 21)
    \citeauthorandyear{keyxyz}
    % outputs: someauthor (2003) <- that's better now
    \citet[22]{keyxyz}
    % outputs: someauthor (ibid., p.22)

\end{document}

For more complex rewrites see the biblatex manual p.131, 4.3.1 \DeclareCiteCommand.