Biblatex: authorname (year 1; year2)

Question

For the same author, I want a reference like Doe (1990; 1997) rather than Doe (1990) and Doe (1997), and I want (Doe 1990; 1997) rather than (Doe 1990; Doe 1997).

In other words, my question is very close to this question but I am using biblatex, not natbib.

Is there a straightforward, simple way to do this? Apologies if I am overlooking something.

Here is the MWE:

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage[applemac]{inputenc}
\usepackage[backend=biber,style=authoryear,giveninits]{biblatex}
\bibliography{Literature}
\begin{document}

I get ``\textcite{Doe1996,Doe1990}" but I want ``Doe (1990; 1997)". I get ``\autocite{Doe1996,Doe1990}" but I want ``(Doe 1990; 1997)"
\end{document}

Answer 1

Switching the style from style=authoryear to style=authoryear-comp should result in an output quite close to the desired one.

From the biblatex documentation: "A compact variant of the authoryearstyle which prints the author only once if subsequent references passed to a single citation command share the same author ".

See also: Biblatex - Combine Papers using citet for a similar question.

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By default, the separator between subsequent years is a comma, while your example shows a semicolon instead. If you want to change the output accordingly, you could redefine \compcitedelim according to your needs:

\renewcommand*{\compcitedelim}{\addsemicolon\space}

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If a single person published using two different versions of their first name, the compression might not work as expected since the author is treated as two different authors who share their last name. To turn off this behaviour without having to alter (homogenize) the first names in the bib file, you can use the package option uniquename = false.

See also: biblatex, authoryear style: In-text citations display first name initials for certain bibliography entries for a related question.