Problems with biblatex and chicago: Parentheses around issue and duplicated year

Question

I have some problems with creating a bibliography adhering entirely to the Chicago style with biblatex. Namely, the issue of journal articles does not appear in parentheses but after the volume separated with a dot (for example "8.1" instead of "8(1)"). Also for every @Misc or @Book entry the year seems to appear twice.

This would be my code:

\documentclass{report} 
\usepackage[style=authoryear,
            citestyle=chicago-authordate,
            doi=false,
            backend=biber, 
            maxnames=2,
            ibidtracker=constrict]{biblatex} 
\usepackage{xpatch}

\begin{document}

   \printbibliography 

\end{document}

I know that I could use biblatex-chicago instead, but unfortunately I do need some features of biblatex for example to divide the bibliography into different parts.

Did I make any mistake in the package specification or is there a way to fix this manually?

Answer 1

The styles of the biblatex-chicago package are a bit special in that it is recommended to load them via the special wrapper package biblatex-chicago and not via biblatex and its style option.

Furthermore, in the question you only load biblatex-chicago's authordate style for citations, the bibliography is still in the standard authoryear style. I can not recommend mixing non-biblatex-chicago and biblatex-chicago styles.

Since biblatex-chicago is for the most part just a thin wrapper around biblatex that sets relevant options, you should be able to do most things you can do with standard biblatex also with biblatex-chicago. (There is a small difference in the option handling of some options. For example, biblatex-chicago's implementation of the natbib compatibility option does not accept a value, but biblatex's version does.)

I suggest you load biblatex-chicago as

\usepackage[authordate,
            backend=biber,
            ]{biblatex-chicago}

You can add additional options when you have verified that you need them.

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[authordate,
            backend=biber,
            ]{biblatex-chicago}

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}


\begin{document}
\autocite{sigfridsson,nussbaum}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

---

In the comments Paul Stanley mentions a more recent alternative to biblatex-chicago: windycity. There are small differences in the output between the two packages, but the general feeling is the same.

biblatex-chicago's authordate style corresponds to windycity's reflist option.

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[style=windycity,
            reflist,
            autocite=inline,
            backend=biber,
            ]{biblatex}

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}


\begin{document}
\autocite{sigfridsson,nussbaum}
\printbibliography
\end{document}