Display 'references' instead of 'bibliography' while using polyglossia

Question

I recently moved from babel to polyglossia because in my thesis I am using English, Sanskrit and Kannada as equally weighted primary languages.

When I use the command \printbibliography{}, it headlines the section as "Bibliography" instead of "References".

Is there any way to get it to say "References" instead? My university insists upon it.

I am aware of various solutions published on this stack similar to this

\AtBeginDocument{\renewcommand{\bibname}{References}}

but they probably apply only to babel as they have no effect on my document.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The default title for the bibliography in an article-like class is "References", in a report/book-like class it is "Bibliography". These names are stored in \refname and \bibname, respectively.

It is a bit tricky to overwrite \refname and \bibname directly, since both biblatex and polyglossia/babel redefine these strings when the language is changed. That means that a change you make may be made undone at begin document (when the document language is set up) or whenever languages are switched.

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With a current version of biblatex the prettiest solution probably uses \DeclarePrintbibliographyDefaults

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainlanguage{english}
\usepackage{csquotes}

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

\DeclarePrintbibliographyDefaults{title=\refname}

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}
Lorem \autocite{sigfridsson}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

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But for a one-off you could just use

\printbibliography[title=\refname]

instead of \printbibliography

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In biblatex contexts, biblatex controls \bibname and uses its bibstring bibliography for that, so

\DefineBibliographyStrings{english}{
  bibliography = {References},
}

would also work.