Footnote and square brackets in biblatex

Question

I'm a TeX beginner and I've been trying to sift through the biblatex manual in order to get the citation style I want, but with very little luck.

What I have now is this:

\usepackage[
    natbib=true,
    sortcites=true,
    block=space,
    bibstyle=numeric,
    citestyle=nature
]{biblatex}

But what I want is this: Square brackets around the citation number on each citation in the text. I want the actual bibliography data to appear in both the bibliography section AND as a footnote on the page with the citation, with the "[n]" preceding it. Does anyone know how to do this? Am I wrong to attempt biblatex, which seems very very complicated?

Answer 1

First of all : no, you are not wrong.

Biblatex manual is a bit daunting and sometimes seems confusing. However, part of the complexity comes from the fact that this is a very powerful tool to choose from different citations schemes, in text and in the bibliography. It allows for many tweaking.

It is probably the best package to deal with bibliography, and very often allows to do specific things without having to deal with special commands, only by configuring the options.

I have to admit, however, that your requirement is a bit difficult to tackle directly and requires some coding. The question has somehow been answered here : Biblatex cite with footnote only once, with use of brackets.

Please take some time looking at the question and, if this seems to be what you are looking for, try implementing the proposed solution. If this does not work, you can describe what is different from your needs.

EDIT : the following sentence is not applicable to the solution I pointed out, as mentionned by Audrey : As for the fact that the citation in footnote should be the complete one, you should probably use the citestyle=verbose option of biblatex or a variation of it.

On a side note, could you explain why you are using natbib=true as an option?