Customising citation style/changing citation style locally

Question

This might be a trivial question but here goes.

Two aspects to my problem:

First; is it possible to have different styles for different citations in the same document?

Second; how can I customize a biblatex citestyle/create my own, such that the citation is only the year, for example?

What I want to achieve is be able to alternate between the 2 citation styles below:

• It was found that this fact is true (Author Year).
• The Author (Year) found that this fact is true.

Answer 1

Your description is not very precise. But it seems that you simply want two forms of citation that biblatex already has:

• \parencite{} will give you citations in the first form.

• \textcite{} will give you citations in the second form.

For more information on the various different citation commands available you may like to consult section 3.8.1 of the biblatex manual (available through texdoc, or chapter 5 of my Easier Read, or Clea F. Rees's recently released biblatex cheat sheet.

If you want to automate this further (e.g. to use one form for a particular source), then more work may be needed: but if what you want is based on the way you are citing, the ordinary commands are what you will need. There are many specific citation commands that can be used directly or built into something that should work for you.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[style=authoryear]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\begin{document}

It was found that this fact was true \parencite{worman}

\textcite{worman} found that this fact was true

\citeauthor{worman} found that this fact was true (\citeyear{worman})

\end{document}