biblatex showing shortcut names in text instead of author(year)

Question

I'm using a dissertation template from my university (don't know everything going on under the hood) and I'm having a hell of a time with the citations.

Basically, the compiled document shows the shortcut name in the text where the citation should be. So for example, if I have

\bibitem[Einstein(1915)]{GR_paper} Einstein, A. 1915. General Relativity.

and in the text I write "In \citealt{GR_paper}, we find..."

The text shows up as "In [GR_paper], we find..."

Note that this happens whether I use \citep{}, \citet{}, \citealt{}, whatever. The citations themselves at the end of the chapter also look a bit funky. They'll show up as

[Einstein(1915)] Einstein, A. 1915. General Relativity.

I want the citation to appear as Einstein (1915) for \citealt and (Einstein 1915) for \citep.

Relevant information:

• the default import is \usepackage[backend=bibtex, sorting=none, bibstyle=ieee, natbib=true]{biblatex}

• trying to \usepackage{natbib} results in a fatal compile error for some reason.

• I'm not using bibtex entries. Instead, all entries are \bibitem{}s. Maybe this is a terrible idea, but it's legacy and would be a huge pain to change now.

• So far I'm not using any .bib or .bbl files, I just use \begin{thebibliography}{99} at the end of each chapter, and place the \bibitems there.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Can provide more information if necessary.

Answer 1

If your bibliography is generated manually with thebibliography and \bibitems you absolutely cannot use biblatex. biblatex uses a completely different systems to produce citations and bibliography entries that is not compatible with thebibliography and \bibitems.

For you this is not of much interest, but it may be nice to know that when you use BibTeX with \bibliographystyle you are still using thebibliography and \bibitem. You just don't have to write them manually, BibTeX produces them for you from the .bib file (the argument of \bibliography) according to the specifications in the .bst file (the argument of \bibliographystyle). So everything that is said here about manual thebibliography also pretty much holds for BibTeX generated bibliographies.

So if you want to write your bibliography with \bibitem you have to remove biblatex from your preamble/template. Of course you then also need to remove all biblatex-related commands like \addbibresource, \printbibliography, \defbibheading, \DeclareFieldFormat ... from your document. If you are using a template, those commands could hide in multiple files. If you completely removed biblatex from your document, you may want to delete all temporary files (.aux, .bbl, .bcf, .toc, ...) to avoid problems with leftover biblatex commands in the auxiliary files.

It should, however, be perfectly possible to use natbib with manual thebibliography. If you want to use natbib with author-year citations, you need to provide author-year data via the optional argument of \bibitem as you already do in

\bibitem[Einstein(1915)]{GR_paper} Einstein, A. 1915. General Relativity.

see also Package natbib Error: Bibliography not compatible with author-year citations (again!).

The following example with natbib and manual thebibliography works absolutely fine.

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage{natbib}
\begin{document}
\citep{GR_paper,sigfridsson}
\begin{thebibliography}{1}
\bibitem[Einstein(1915)]{GR_paper} Einstein, A. 1915. General Relativity.
\bibitem[Sigfridsson and Ryde(1998)]{sigfridsson} Sigfridsson, E. and Ryde, U. 1998.
  Comparison of methods for deriving atomic charges from the electrostatic potential and moments.
  \emph{Journal of Computational Chemistry} 19(4): 377--395.
\end{thebibliography}
\end{document}