How to change citations in the text from brackets to parentheses?

Question

My problem is as follows: I composed my thesis using the thesis template provided by Matthias Pospiech (http://www.matthiaspospiech.de/latex/vorlagen/) He used the biblatex package for bibliographies.

OK, now I had a look at the specifications of my faculty regarding styles and co. And according to these guidelines I have to use parentheses for the citations in the text, e.g., (42) rather then brackets, e.g., [42].

Now that all my writing is done I want to make as little changes as possible. I thought about using

\renewcommand{\mkbibbrackets}[1]{\mkbibparens{#1}}

Good news is: It works and all my references are now cited in parentheses. However, I'd like to know if this is some kind of quick'n'dirty hack and if there is a more elegant way to get parentheses (for the next time...).

For reference, this answer gives a good solution if nested parentheses are needed. It achieves the opposite effect, turning parentheses into brackets, but I suspect it can be modified fairly easily. — René B. Christensen, Dec 22 '15 at 09:52

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 22 '15 at 10:58

5

Writing these lines in your preamble should do the trick:

\DeclareCiteCommand{\cite}[\mkbibparens]
  {\usebibmacro{prenote}}
  {\usebibmacro{citeindex}%
   \usebibmacro{cite}}
  {\multicitedelim}
  {\usebibmacro{postnote}}

\DeclareCiteCommand{\parencite}[\mkbibparens]
  {\usebibmacro{prenote}}
  {\usebibmacro{citeindex}%
   \usebibmacro{cite}}
  {\multicitedelim}
  {\usebibmacro{postnote}}

answered Dec 22 '15 at 10:58

Bernard

271,350

1

Thx, indeed it does... However, I'd like to know, what's the benefit of this solution compared to \renewcommand... ? – hatze Dec 22 '15 at 12:11
3

It replaces bib brackets with parentheses only for citations. \mkbibbrackets is also used in other contexts, where you may not want any replacement. – Bernard Dec 22 '15 at 12:45
2

@hatze While this solution might be longer code-wise it is certainly cleaner from a semantic perspective. You don't want all square brackets to be round brackets, you just want your citations to be wrapped in round brackets. Of course a modification of \textcite will require a bit more code (it is still quite straightforward, though). – moewe Dec 22 '15 at 13:01
1

Thx for the explanations. I agree and will use @Bernard's solution. – hatze Dec 22 '15 at 13:04
@hatze If you want your bibliography list to use round brackets, you might want to add \DeclareFieldFormat{labelnumberwidth}{\mkbibparens{#1}} and maybe even \DeclareFieldFormat{shorthandwidth}{\mkbibparens{#1}} as well. – moewe Dec 22 '15 at 15:08

How to change citations in the text from brackets to parentheses?

1 Answers1