Tweaking the style of the elements of the bibliography (using biblatex/biber)

Question

I want to use biblatex for my bibliogrphy, but I don't like some things in the style of the entries of the bibliography.

My minimal working example:

Database biblio.bib

@article{example,
    author  =   {Author},
    title   =   {Title},
    journal =   {Journal},
    year    =   {2018}
}

Main file:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[backend=biber,style=alphabetic]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblio.bib}

\begin{document}
    I want to cite \cite{example}.

    \printbibliography
\end{document}

If I run this, the article is cited as

[Aut18] Author. "Title". In: Journal (2018)

I would like to avoid the "In:" and have it cited as

[Aut18] Author. "Title". Journal (2018)

Moreover, if I remove the year and use

@article{example,
    author  =   {Author},
    title   =   {Title},
    journal =   {Journal}
}

then I get

[Aut18] Author. "Title". In: Journal ()

I would like to avoid the empty brackets as well, if possible. Is there a pre-implemented way to do these things? If not, how can I do it?

Answer 1

It is easily possible to remove the "in:" either for all entry types or for @article, see Suppress "In:" biblatex.

Your second point about the empty brackets is more subtle. The biblatex documentation lists date/year among the required fields for @article. While it is sometimes possible to omit some required fields I don't think this is acceptable here. As discussed elsewhere (Format of @article without journal title field in biblatex bibliography entries) @article is only appropriate for articles that were actually published in a journal. As such they will always have a journal field, they will almost always have a volume field, and they will always have a year/date (i.e. the date the journal volume was published).

If you want to refer to arXiv preprints that were not yet published in a journal, don't use @article - use @online instead.

In the comments you talked about citing a paper that is still in the making. If you really must cite it even though it has never been made publicly accessible up to now (how will anybody get hold of it, if it is not published?) you can use @unpublished since that is what it is. If you have already put it on a preprint server or your website, then cite it as @online.