Using Biblatex, how can I cite different sources differently?

Question

I am working on a document where I want to cite one source in one specific way and all the other sources in a different way. More specifically, I want to cite the source named "drama" like this:

"some citation from the drama" (p. 54)

whilst all the other sources shall be cited like this:

"now something else" (Shakespeare, Hamlet, p. 123)

How can I achieve this?

Currently, all my citations are done with the \autocite command.

Answer 1

You can try to suppress all citation output for a particular work. But then you have to be careful to only cite this work with page references.

In the example below we suppress sigfridsson. The implementation here is for the authoryear style. Other styles can be handled similarly (at least in principle), but the exact implementation will look different and may be significantly more complex.

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

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

\newcommand*{\ifhidecite}{\iffieldequalstr{entrykey}{sigfridsson}}

\renewbibmacro*{cite}{%
  \ifhidecite
    {}
    {\iffieldundef{shorthand}
       {\ifthenelse{\ifnameundef{labelname}\OR\iffieldundef{labelyear}}
          {\usebibmacro{cite:label}%
           \setunit{\printdelim{nonameyeardelim}}}
          {\printnames{labelname}%
           \setunit{\printdelim{nameyeardelim}}}%
        \usebibmacro{cite:labeldate+extradate}}
       {\usebibmacro{cite:shorthand}}}}

\renewbibmacro*{postnote}{%
  \iffieldundef{postnote}
    {\ifhidecite
       {\PackageWarning{biblatex}{%
          Hidden citation without postnote.\MessageBreak
          The citation outout may look weird}}
       {}}
    {\setunit{\printdelim{postnotedelim}}%
     \printfield{postnote}}}

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}


\begin{document}
\autocite[45]{sigfridsson}

\autocite[380]{worman}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

Answer 2

You probably don't want to include every page reference to the topic drama in an index. In that case you could use a hack like this snippet of code:

. . . from the drama'' (p.~54)