I use natbib
and switching to biblatex
in order to produce documents that can be converted with relative ease between author-date citations with a reference list and the "everything in footnotes" style with a full citation at first occurrence and abbreviated citations thereafter. I feel a bit daunted. It does not seem likely that I can reasonably expect one source file can produce both formats simply by changing an option, but that might be the ideal solution. In any case, I am really just looking for advice on the best way to write my documents.
For author-date citations, I like to freely mix references to authors and references to papers, and I give the first and last name of the author the first time it appears, the last name alone thereafter. So, a typical passage might look like this:
David Lewis's (1980) Principal Principle is one of my favorite principles. One of my favorite papers is Lewis 1994. Everybody should be rational (Lewis 1980; van Fraassen 1984). Lewis said a lot of things. For instance, he said that everybody should be rational (1980), and he said that everybody should drive on the right side of the road (1969).
Now, even in natbib
, I don't think I was coding these things right. For instance, I didn't know the right way to get the apostrophe in the first citation; I didn't know any automated way of enforcing my first-name-at-first-use-only policy; and I was making heavy use of \citealp
for paper citations and (\citeyear{XXX})
for parenthetical citations, which doesn't seem to be the recommended style. But what is the optimal way to do all this in biblatex
?
For the "everything in footnotes" style, it seems that substantial changes to my source will be necessary. Most citations will have to be moved to the end of the sentence, and I will have to use references to papers less freely since I will need to refer to them by title, which is cumbersome. Also, citations within footnotes will need to be restructured. Most obviously, they will need to be written with sensitivity to whether the citation is a first citation or not because first occurrence citations are long and will break the flow of a sentence. However, it does appear that at least I am not likely to have to learn any new citation commands for writing citations in footnotes beyond those I will need to learn to do author-date citations in biblatex
.
Any words of wisdom from more experienced biblatexers?