biblatex - change appearance of reference number as they appear in the References section only

Question

I would like to change the appearance of the References section such that:

• the labels appear like 1. instead of [1]
• the labels are hanging left into the margin, and the text is aligned with the margin instead of the numbers

I would like to keep the reference appearance as [1] as it appears in the main body of my text.

Looking through the biblatex manual, this doesn't seem obvious.

Answer 1

You want to set leftmargin to zero in the bibliography environment. Take the default from numeric.bbx (ll. 24-37) and play around with the values until you like the outcome.

The number formatting in the bibliography can be modified by playing with the labelnumberwidth field format.

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage[backend=biber, style=numeric]{biblatex}
\DeclareFieldFormat{labelnumberwidth}{#1\addperiod}
\defbibenvironment{bibliography}
  {\list
     {\printtext[labelnumberwidth]{%
        \printfield{labelprefix}%
        \printfield{labelnumber}}}
     {\setlength{\labelwidth}{\labelnumberwidth}%
      \setlength{\leftmargin}{0pt}%
      \setlength{\labelsep}{\biblabelsep}%
      \setlength{\itemsep}{\bibitemsep}%
      \setlength{\parsep}{\bibparsep}}%
      \renewcommand*{\makelabel}[1]{\hss##1}}
  {\endlist}
  {\item}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\begin{document}
Lorem \autocite{sigfridsson,worman,geer,nussbaum}
\lipsum[1-2]
\printbibliography
\end{document}

Answer 2

Using enumitem package, I did the following:

\defbibenvironment{bibliography}%
{\begin{enumerate}[leftmargin=0pt,labelsep=2ex,itemsep=2pt]}%
{\end{enumerate}}%
{\item}%