Biblatex inherits publication date from urldate in bibliography

Question

Using biber, I do not encounter this issue but I want to use bibtex for the backend option.

I have an "online" bibitem with an accessed on date but no publication date. I want the output to be along the lines of AUTHOR (n.d.) URL [Accessed on: dd/mm/year].

I can only find a way to do this by clearing the urlyear, which I don't want to do. Furthermore, this thread suggests setting the year to the text "n.d." however this generates a warning about issues with sorting which I would like to avoid.

MWE:

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[style=authoryear, backend=biber, urldate=long, dateabbrev=false]{biblatex}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@online{appleby,
  author  = {Humphrey Appleby},
  date = {},
  title   = {On the Importance of the Civil Service},
  url     = {https://example.com/gov/sir-humphrey/importance-civil-service},
  urldate = {2018-08-23},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

I would like to display n.d. or similar in the empty brackets. I could do this either by:

Preventing the publication date being inherited from the access date.
Manually setting the date to be "null" somehow, but doing this it gives ("null") as the date in the ways that I have tried.

Thanks.

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 22 '20 at 00:13

If you must use bibtex as your backend, then you can specify year = {nodate} instead of using the date field.

Aside: If you use biber as backend, then I think the easiest option is just to alter the definition of \DeclareLabeldate to remove urldate from the list of allowable fields. e.g.,

\DeclareLabeldate{%
  \field{date}
  \field{year}
  \field{eventdate}
  \field{origdate}
  \literal{nodate}
}

MWE using `bibtex` as backend

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[style=authoryear, backend=bibtex, urldate=long, dateabbrev=false]{biblatex}

\begin{filecontents}[overwrite]{\jobname.bib}
@online{appleby,
  author  = {Humphrey Appleby},
  year    = {nodate},
  title   = {On the Importance of the Civil Service},
  url     = {https://example.com/gov/sir-humphrey/importance-civil-service},
  urldate = {2018-08-23},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

Biblatex inherits publication date from urldate in bibliography

1 Answers1

MWE using bibtex as backend

MWE using `bibtex` as backend