Short citeauthor for bib (backend biber)

Question

I want to cite the authors of a publication. Say "A. Foo, B. Bar, and C. FooBar".

Using \citeauthor from biblatex with Biber backend it produces:

Foo, Bar and FooBar.

Great!

I am looking for some command (something like \shortciteauthor maybe) that produces only the name from the first author with "et al." afterwards.

So instead of above I only want

Foo et al.

Is there something like this? Sorry for not providing a MWE I didn't come up with something really short enough.

Answer 1

Use the starred version \citeauthor*

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=authoryear, backend=biber]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\begin{document}
\citeauthor*{aksin}
\citeauthor{aksin}
\citeauthor*{companion}
\citeauthor{companion}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

Note that if you use the natbib compatibility mode (natbib=true,, Is there a disadvantage to using natbib=true with biblatex?), the meaning of \citeauthor* is inverted: it prints all authors. In that case you can restore the original \citeauthor* which only prints the first author by adding

\DeclareCiteCommand*{\citeauthor}
  {\boolfalse{citetracker}%
   \boolfalse{pagetracker}%
   \usebibmacro{prenote}}
  {\ifciteindex
     {\indexnames{labelname}}
     {}%
   \printnames[][1-1]{labelname}}
  {\multicitedelim}
  {\usebibmacro{postnote}}

to your preamble.