How to change all the BibTeX \cite{} commands to BibLaTeX parenthetical citation commands when switching from pure vanilla BibTeX to BibLaTEX?

Question

Context

I have a thesis of over 340 pages written using LaTeX and one massive BibTeX file for references (.bib). The thesis employs the \cite{} command for all in-text citations, there is a zillion of these scattered in all the chapters. I know there are other questions tackling transforming from BibTeX + natbib to BibLaTeX & vice versa.

When using natbib + BibTeX TO BibLaTeX, the solution would be to add the option natbib=true but this relies on using already \citet and \citep throughout the document not the traditional \cite{} if I am not mistaken.

Anyway my context is different. I only have the \cite{} command used. This is why I called it the pure Vanilla BibTeX \cite{} command - no other packages used. I wanted to change my citation style to an author-year style so I moved to BibLaTeX and used the apa style. The previous citation style was numerical: [1-3]

\usepackage[backend=biber,style=apa,citestyle=authoryear]{biblatex}

The first problem encountered is that all \cite{} instances gave me the traditional non-parenthetical citations which I do not want. Ex: Cabanier et al., 2014 instead of (Cabanier et al., 2014).

That can be solved by changing every \cite{} to \autocite{} or \parencite{} but that would be cumbersome to do for all the instances. I have thousands of instances.

The second problem encountered is that only part of citation i.e. the year is clickable not the whole citation. I am using also hyperref.

Question

Apologies! I am new to BibLaTeX, any suggestions on how to solve both problems, are greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Every good text editor should have a search-and-replace feature.

It should be quite safe to replace

• \cite[ with \autocite[ and
• \cite{ with \autocite{.

Make a backup of your file, then perform the search-and-replace, compile and scrutinise the output carefully.

In theory you could just take the definition of \parencite from the .cbx and replace \parencite with \cite to redefine \cite to give the same output as \parencite. But that feels like cheating, is inconsistent with usual behaviour, prevents you from using the real \cite should you want to and may have some subtle stumbling blocks that mean that the output is slightly different (think delimiter contexts).

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The link thingy is a commonly mentioned issue, have a look at hyperlink name with biblatex authoryear (biblatex 1.4b) and linked questions.