Achieve compatibility between biblatex and cite packages

Question

Generating a bibliography with bibtex in combination with the cite-package leads to migrated punctuation characters while using supercript citations. For example, this code leads to the following output:

This is an example sentence\cite{example}.

This is an example sentence.[1]

Changing from bibtex to biblatex, I had to exclude the cite-package due to incompatibility. Thus the above shown code leads to the following output, where the punktuation character is not moved:

This is an example sentence[1].

As the migration of punctuation characters is a, in my case, desired behaviour, especially when having citations in figure captions and using the "textformat=period" option of the caption package, I would like to know if there is any possible way to achieve this functionality wile using biblatex rather than bibtex.

Answer 1

biblatex also supports moving punctuation around, but only with \autocite. Just to address the title of your question: You cannot make biblatex and cite compatible - they are fundamental incompatible, but most of cite's behaviour can be replicated with biblatex. So we don't need to.

If you use a numeric-like style, this is not enabled by default, you need to tell biblatex to move punctuation to the left of the citation with \DeclareAutoCiteCommand{inline}[l]{\parencite}{\parencites} (autocite=inline is the default setting for numeric styles).

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[backend=biber, style=numeric]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\DeclareAutoCiteCommand{inline}[l]{\parencite}{\parencites}

\begin{document}
Lorem.\autocite{sigfridsson}

Ipsum. \autocite{sigfridsson}

Dolor \autocite{sigfridsson}.
\end{document}

To my eye that does not look very aesthetically pleasing. You can see that the feature is designed for footnote numbers, where the result is nicer.

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Your comment suggests you actually want \supercite. In which case we only need

\usepackage[backend=biber, style=numeric, autocite=superscript]{biblatex}

to switch the \autocite style to \supercite.