How can I use \renewbibmacro with different entry types?

Question

Following on from this question, I want j.a.'s to appear thus:

Biernacki, P. and Waldorf, D. (1981). “Snowball sampling: Problems and techniques
of chain referral sampling”, Sociological methods & research
10.2, pp. 141–163.

which moewe's fabulous solution does (getting rid of 'In:'):

\renewbibmacro*{in:}{%
  \setunit{\addcomma\space}%
  \ifentrytype{article}
    {}
    {\printtext{%
       \bibstring{in}\intitlepunct}}}

BUT at the same time I want incollections to appear as:

Froestad, J., Shearing, C., and Van der Merwe, M. (2015) ‘Criminology: Re-
Imagining Security and Risk.’, in Bourbeau, P. (ed) Security: Dialogue across
Disciplines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., pp. 177–195.

but the ', in' appears as ' In:'. So I want to add a comma before, lowercase the I and remove the colon. I have tried repeating similar code to moewe's answer but I cannot get it to work: only the last renewbibmacro does anything. TIA!!

Answer 1

\renewbibmacro*{in:}{%
  \setunit{\addcomma\space}%
  \ifentrytype{article}
    {}
    {\printtext{%
       \bibstring{in}\intitlepunct}}}

\renewcommand*{\intitlepunct}{\addspace}

is the correct solution for what you want.

But there is a slight catch to this that becomes apparent when we use the code with the minimal example from your question Why can't my MWE see the references?.

If you have additionally modified the field format of the title field (I'm speculating here, because you have not shared an MWE, but it is not entirely outlandish that such a thing happened because you must have modified the style heavily to obtain the output you show) the periods that you placed at the ends of the fields of froestad2015Criminology could confuse biblatex's punctuation tracker.

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{friedman2001greedy,
  title     = {Greedy function approximation: a gradient boosting machine},
  author    = {Friedman, Jerome H.},
  journal   = {Annals of Statistics},
  pages     = {1189--1232},
  year      = {2001},
  publisher = {JSTOR},
}
@incollection {froestad2015Criminology,
  author    = {Froestad, J. and Shearing, C. and {Van der Merwe}, M.},
  title     = {Criminology:  Re-Imagining  Security  and  Risk.},
  booktitle = {Security: Dialogue across Disciplines.},
  publisher = {Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.},
  year      = {2015},
  pages     = {177--195},
  editor    = {Bourbeau, P.},
}
\end{filecontents}


\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[%
  backend=biber,
  style=authortitle,
  sorting=nyt,
]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\DeclareFieldFormat[incollection]{title}{\enquote{#1}}

\renewbibmacro*{in:}{%
  \setunit{\addcomma\space}%
  \ifentrytype{article}
    {}
    {\printtext{%
       \bibstring{in}\intitlepunct}}}

\renewcommand*{\intitlepunct}{\addspace}

\begin{document}
  \textcite{friedman2001greedy,froestad2015Criminology}

  \printbibliography
\end{document}

gives

biblatex tries to suppress double punctuation and so the full stop at the end of

“Criminology: Re-Imagining Security and Risk.”

suppresses the comma that would normally follow it because a full stop can not be followed by a comma.

The effect is not really visible (if you look really closely it is actually) for the

Security: Dialogue across Disciplines.

because that would be followed by a full stop anyway (but if you have the . in the booktitle field the period is in italics, while it is upright if biblatex adds it itself).

The comma is not suppressed in

Cambridge University Press., 2015

because biblatex (incorrectly in this field) assumes that a . in the publisher field always signifies an abbreviation after which a comma is fine.

The solution is to remove the superfluous periods from your .bib file.

@incollection {froestad2015Criminology,
  author    = {Froestad, J. and Shearing, C. and {Van der Merwe}, M.},
  title     = {Criminology:  Re-Imagining  Security  and  Risk},
  booktitle = {Security: Dialogue across Disciplines},
  publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
  location  = {Cambridge},
  year      = {2015},
  pages     = {177--195},
  editor    = {Bourbeau, P.},
}

works just fine and gives the expected