How to use custom bibstyle with biblatex

Question

I am using Biblatex for bibliography. This works fine with builtin styles like ieee. But when I gave a custom bst file I got it gives me not found error.

My command was

\usepackage[bibstyle=splncs]{biblatex}

I put the file splncs.bst in the same folder containing the tex and bib file.

Biblatex works fine when inbuilt styles are used

Answer 1

biblatex uses a different style format (.bbx, .cbx, .lbx) than BibTeX (.bst). That means you cannot use your .bst files (BibTeX styles/\bibliographystyles) together with biblatex (or Biber, for that matter).

Note also that you can't use your .bst files with Biber. While Biber is a replacement for BibTeX when used for biblatex, it can not deal with .bst files at all and so would be of no use as a replacement for BibTeX in the classic BibTeX bibliography set-up.

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As far as I'm aware there is no "converter" for .bst to .bbx/.cbx, and it is very unlikely that someone will actually create such a converter. Joseph suggests in the comment that this is impossible.

As a general rule: If you have to use a certain .bst file (because you institution requires you to do so, your publisher insists on a certain template etc.) it is best to go with BibTeX and the exact setup recommended in the guidelines. If you just happen to like a particular .bst file, you can check first if someone has created a biblatex style for it (a list of styles can be found here), if that is not the case, you can try and create the style yourself.

To implement a bibliography style yourself, first choose an appropriate basis for your style, find the standard biblatex style that comes closest to your intended style (as a rule of thumb the standard styles are easier to modify than heavily customised styles like biblatex-chicago, biblatex-apa, these only lends themselves to be used as a basis if the changes needed are miniscule). According to this, that would probably numeric in your case.

Then you go on to modify the style to your needs. A started is Guidelines for customizing biblatex styles, but there are much more questions about all kinds of customisations on this site.