Biblatex text cite style

Question

I want to change the style of the short names for the citations in the text. The implementation of biblatex I am using is as follows:

\usepackge[
style=alphabetic,
isbn=false,
doi=false,
url=false,
firstinits=true, 
pagetracker=true,
maxbibnames=50,
maxcitenames=1, 
minalphanames=1,
autocite=inline,
block=space,
backref=true,
backrefstyle=three+,
date=short,
backend=bibtex,
bibencoding=UTF8
]{biblatex}

This works fine so far. It produces a bibliography that looks like this:

I want to change the citations in brackets on the left. Currently they take the first three letters for one author, for more authors it just takes the first letter for each the authors and for mor than 3 authors it takes the first 3 letters of the first author and adds a plus. After that they get two numbers for the year.

Now I want that all papers just get the first three letters of the first authors last name (and the two numbers for the year). In my citavi .bib file it is set that way but I don't know how to change this in latex.

EDIT: Ok good news, it did work and the bibliography looks just the way I wanted, thanks a lot!

But now there have appeared some error masseges at the print bibliography:

And the errors say:

I appreciate the help, thanks. Daniel

Answer 1

With BibTeX as backend (backend=bibtex,) there is no official biblatex interface to modify the alphabetic label in the way you want. You need to use Biber. Switching to Biber should be as easy as changing backend=bibtex, to backend=biber, and running Biber instead of BibTeX in the compilation cycle (if you are using an editor to help you compile your documents, see Biblatex with Biber: Configuring my editor to avoid undefined citations for help with setting it up to run Biber for you). (The keys generated by Citavi or other software has no bearing on the alphabetic label produced by biblatex.)

With Biber the alphabetic label can be easily customised with \DeclareLabelalphaTemplate. You'll also want to set maxalphanames=1, to make sure the label is only drawn from the first author. If you don't want to see the "+" for "et al." you can remove it with \renewcommand*{\labelalphaothers}{}.

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

\usepackage[style=alphabetic, maxalphanames=1, backend=biber]{biblatex}

\DeclareLabelalphaTemplate{
  \labelelement{
    \field[final]{shorthand}
    \field{label}
    \field[strwidth=3,strside=left]{labelname}
  }
  \labelelement{
    \field[strwidth=2,strside=right]{year}
  }
}

% if you want to suppress the "+" for "et al."
%\renewcommand*{\labelalphaothers}{}


\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}
\cite{sigfridsson,nussbaum,worman,geer,aksin,companion,herrmann}
\printbibliography
\end{document}