Before switch to biblatex, I was using bibtex like this:
\usepackage[round, semicolon, authoryear]{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
I'd like to get the very same style with biblatex (without usage of natbib backward compatibility).
In the text, in case of two authors, I wish only "Smith and Jones (2017)" (as \citet) or "(Smith and Jones 2017)" (as \citep). I don't mind if there is "et" or "&" instead of "and". In case of 3 and more authors, I wish only "Smith et al. (2017)" (as \citet) or "(Smith et al., 2017)" (as \citep).
In the bibliography listing, I wish all authors, and I'd prefer the title to be bold and not in quotes, but I can live without it.
All this was very straightforward with natbib above and citet/citep, but I can't figure out how to reach it in with biblatex/biber. My main reason to switch to biblatex was basically no reasonable way how to sort accented characters with bibtex.
Simply, in the best case, it should look like following picture:
Some settings (like back referenes) I managed to set, but for the above I really do struggle...
I also must say I like more some features of biblatex, like clickable DOI or back references "(cit. on p. XX)".
Problematic working example is
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xltxtra}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{realscripts}
\usepackage{metalogo}
\usepackage{xunicode}
\usepackage[autostyle=true, english=british]{csquotes}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setdefaultlanguage[variant=british]{english}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\usepackage[x11names]{xcolor}
\usepackage[
backend=biber,
bibstyle=authortitle,
citestyle=authoryear-comp,
autocite=inline,
sorting=ynt,
sortcase=true,
sortcites=true,
maxbibnames=100,
mincitenames=1,
maxcitenames=2,
hyperref=true,
backref=true,
backrefstyle=none,
maxalphanames=1
]{biblatex}
\usepackage[
breaklinks=true,
colorlinks=true,
linkcolor={Firebrick4},
anchorcolor={Blue4},
citecolor={Green4},
filecolor={DeepPink4},
menucolor={Chocolate4},
urlcolor={DodgerBlue4},
bookmarks=true,
pdfencoding=auto,
unicode=true,
xetex
]{hyperref}
\addbibresource{references.bib}
\begin{document}
\begin{filecontents}{references.bib}
@article{Shaw2005,
author={Shaw, Joey and Lickey, Edgar B and Beck, John T and Farmer, Susan B and Liu, Wusheng and Miller, Jermey and Siripun, K C and Winder, Charles T and Schilling, Edward E and Small, Ramdall L},
doi={10.3732/ajb.92.1.142},
issn={0002-9122},
journal={American Journal of Botany},
month={01},
number={1},
pages={142--166},
title={{The tortoise and the hare II: relative utility of 21 noncoding chloroplast DNA sequences for phylogenetic analysis}},
url={https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3732/ajb.92.1.142},
volume={92},
year={2005}
}
@article{Shaw2007,
author={Shaw, Joey and Lickey, Edgar B and Schilling, Edward E and Small, Ramdall L},
doi={10.3732/ajb.94.3.275},
issn={0002-9122},
journal={American Journal of Botany},
month={03},
number={3},
pages={275--288},
title={{Comparison of whole chloroplast genome sequences to choose noncoding regions for phylogenetic studies in angiosperms: the tortoise and the hare III}},
url={https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3732/ajb.94.3.275},
volume={94},
year={2007}
}
\end{filecontents}
XXX \textcite{Shaw2005} XXX \textcite{Shaw2007} XXX \textcite{Shaw2005,Shaw2007}, XXX \parencite{Shaw2005} XXX \parencite{Shaw2007} XXX \parencite{Shaw2005,Shaw2007} XXX.
\printbibliography
\end{document}
It renders as:
There should be only "Shaw et al (2005)" and so on. Only one name before "et al", no more.



plainnat(at least in theory - I have never done it), doing that in full detail is going to be a lot of work. But if you can live with small differences it should be doable. Many bits and pieces of the puzzle are already answered elsewhere on this site. Just search and you'll find it. – moewe May 18 '18 at 14:50biblatexnormally does not abbreviate author lists in a way that they could get ambiguous. You can turn off that feature withuniquelist=false,, see https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/69028/35864 – moewe May 19 '18 at 20:28bibstyle=authortitle, citestyle=authoryear-comp,is a slightly unusual combination. Normally author-year citation styles are combined with author-year bibliography styles. With the author-title style that is currently used the year is not very prominent and is harder to find in the bibliography making it difficult to find the correct entry for a particular citation.sorting=ynt,adds another layer of difficulty: It sorts by year, name and title. But one would normally expect name, year, title with those citations ... – moewe May 19 '18 at 20:31sortcase=true,is the default (normally I wouldn't dream of changing the value of thesortcaseoption, whatever the default value).sortcites=true,is already issued bycitestyle=authoryear-comp,.hyperref=true,is no better than the defaulthyperref=auto,(they only differ in their behaviour ifhyperrefis not loaded:truedisplays a warning in that case,autodoes nothing - ifhyperrefis not loaded neither of the two actually turns on links).maxalphanames=1is not used by the style you use, it is only relevant foralphabeticstyles. – moewe May 19 '18 at 20:35