Sorting bibliography and modifying apa-style of BibLaTeX properly

Question

I worked my way through the biblatex and apastyle documentation, but couldn't find a way to solve my problems. Maybe one of you can help me.

\documentclass[12pt,twoside]{report}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\bibliographystyle{apalike}
\usepackage[style=apa, sorting=none,doi=false]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{Literature.bib}
\begin{document}
text with \cite{Example.2002} or \footcite{Example.2003}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

As shown above, I am using biblatex and the \footcite or \cite commands for my references. While using the apastyle in my preamble two main problems arise:

1. Without sorting=none the bibliography remains empty. But I want an alphabetic order for which I would need to apply the nyt-option but then the bibliography is not attached.
2. I want to put the year for both citations commands into parentheses. I tried to find a way through the authoryear-style which leads to broken references and even more problems. Is there a possibility to apply the parentheses in my example?

I read a lot of similar threads and I know that there are other approaches but I would to prefer to change as little as possible because it took a long time to get the current version in an acceptable form.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The apa style for biblatex implements an exact version of the APA 7th edition style, and is not really designed to be modified. You certainly should not be using sorting=none with it. Furthermore, the \bibliographystyle command is not used will biblatex and will be ignored. To use in-text citations with apa you should use the \textcite command. This will give you Author (Year) citations. Instead of using \footcite you can instead use \footnote{\textcite{...}} which will yield the same format inside footnotes.

When using an author/year scheme, the prenote is not very useful, since it appears inside the parenthesized year. The postnote can be used, and in the APA style, will appear with a comma after the year. Note that for the postnote, you should just provide a page number or a page range, and the style will add the p. or pp. automatically.

Here's a full example:

\documentclass[12pt,twoside]{report}
\usepackage[style=apa, doi=false]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\begin{document}
See \textcite[529-531]{bertram} or\footnote{\textcite[579]{glashow}}
\printbibliography
\end{document}