How to present full acronym of authors' last names in citations in biblatex's alphabetical style

Question

I want the citations under biblatex alphabetical style to show the full list of authors. This is not a problem if the list of authors for the particular publication contains less than or equal to 3 authors. However, if the list of authors contains any more than 3 authors, then the citation gets truncated to the last name of the first author and a "+" sign.

Neither of maxnames nor minnames seem to do anything to remedy this problem. Using the option maxnames=4 only fixes the bibliography. Consider the example:

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage[backend=biber, style=alphabetic, mincitenames=10, maxcitenames=10]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{trial2.bib}
\begin{document}
A citation \cite{cita}.
\printbibliography
\end{document}

where trial2.bib is the .bib file

@article {cita,
    AUTHOR = {Add, Abel and Bc, Bobby and Ca, Carla and De, Daniela},
    TITLE = {Article},
    JOURNAL = {Some},
    FJOURNAL = {Any},
    VOLUME = {1},
    YEAR = {2018},
    NUMBER = {1},
    PAGES = {1--10},
}

The output has the citation "[Add+18]". I would like the citation to read "[ABCD18]". Any help is much appreciated. If there is a way to do this in bibtex with the bibliography style alpha instead, that would also be fine. It is important to me though that the citation style is pretty much the same as in these two styles.

If it matters at all, I'm working on TeXStudio, on a Linux.

Answer 1

You are looking for maxalphanames and minalphanames. They are analogous to maxnames/minnames but affect the generation of the alphabetic labels. Assuming you want not to truncate labels with less than six names, and if so not to less than four names, you could use:

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage[backend=biber, style=alphabetic, maxnames=6, minalphanames=4, maxalphanames=6]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{trial2.bib}

\begin{document}
A citation \cite{cita}.
\printbibliography
\end{document}