Issues switching from BibTex to BibLaTeX

Question

I was having issues with the regular BibTeX with trying to get it to print a citation style I wanted. Particularly for SAE papers where it is useful to print the SAE Paper number. So I thought I would give BibLaTeX a try as this will allow me to easily make my own style should I need to.

However, as of right now I can't seem to get BibLaTeX (using the biber backend) to even print the citations as they were. Instead of putting a [1] at the cite location its putting the citation key from the bib file with an awkward space at the end like this [Schmidt2011 ]. And the command \printbibliography doesn't do anything at all!.

I get this error on running Biber making me think that there is something up with my bib file which is generated by Mendeley.

INFO - This is Biber 1.0 
INFO - Logfile is 'BiblatexTESTwithUpdatedDPFstuff.blg' 
INFO - Reading 'BiblatexTESTwithUpdatedDPFstuff.bcf' 
INFO - Found 1 citekeys in bib section 0 
INFO - Processing section 0 
INFO - Looking for bibtex format file 'Alex.bib' for section 0
INFO - Decoding LaTeX character macros into UTF-8 INFO - Found BibTeX data source 
'Alex.bib' WARN - Entry Gel does not parse correctly 
WARN - BibTeX subsystem: 
C:\Users\mmam16\AppData\Local\Temp\3y7590B5Os\Alex.bib_7160.utf8, line 4, warning: 95 
characters of junk seen at toplevel 
ERROR - BibTeX subsystem: 
C:\Users\mmam16\AppData\Local\Temp\3y7590B5Os\Alex.bib_7160.utf8, line 1427, syntax error: 
found "and1990", expected "," 
INFO - WARNINGS: 2 INFO - ERRORS: 1

and this is my tex File:

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper,final]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\graphicspath{{./Diagrams/}}
\usepackage[labelfont={sf,bf}, textfont=it, margin=1cm, center]{caption}
\usepackage{subcaption}
\usepackage[left=2cm,right=2cm,top=2cm,bottom=2cm]{geometry}
\usepackage[backend=biber,citestyle=numeric-comp,doi=true,url=true]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{Alex.bib}
\begin{document}
Stuff in here \cite{Schmidt2011}.
\begin{figure}[h!]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth, keepaspectratio=true]{FilterPoreFunc}
\caption{Cordierite DPF behavior with PM loading. Redrawn and modified from        \cite{Schmidt2011}}
\label{fig:Pores}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[h!]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth, keepaspectratio=true]{FilterBehave}
\caption{Cordierite DPF behavior with PM loading - Old diagram for comparison. Copied directly from \cite{Schmidt2011}}
\label{fig:Pores2}
\end{figure}
%\bibliographystyle{unsrt}
%\bibliography{Alex}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

What am I doing wrong? The documentation with BibLaTeX is very complete, but it inst half difficult to follow. Any help would be much appreciated (virtual beers all round). Or should I just keep to the older bibtex?

Answer 1

Using Mendeley and biblatex here as well and as far as I know Mendeley doesn't produce a Biber file. If I use the backend=biber command I can reproduce your problem, not the error just the citation key instead of the number (this is the biblatex version of the [?] .) If you remove the backend=biber command it should work.

Answer 2

Search your Mendeley or exportet Bibtex Database for the string and1990. It is most likely, that Mendeley created a citation key that includes a symbol like an apostrophe ' (e.g. O'Hand1990), which is legal for the bibtex backend but illegal for biber backend. So you have two solutions:

1. Change the citation key in Mendely to a legal string (only letters and numbers). (Recommended option. See also here)

2. Use bibtex