BibLaTeX Authoryear-Icomp – Fixing Maxnames Not Working

author-numberbiblatex

I have been fighting quite a while with the following problem (which might be related to some strange previous errors in my document):

I use authoryear-icomp with the following options and XeLaTeX (all packages up-to-date): 

\usepackage[safeinputenc,uniquename=full,maxnames=2,minnames=1,maxbibnames=99,
    style=authoryear-icomp,dashed=true,backend=biber]{biblatex}

I have two references in my bibfile that share the first five authors and the year. In my cite I get:

(author1,author2,author3,author4,author5 year;
author1,author2,author3,author4,author5,author6 year)

which is really ugly.

Does anybody have a hint for me how to get that fixed? I'd like to have something like

(author1,author2,year-a; author1,author2,year-b)

I tried to gamble around with the uniquename option without any results also.

Best Answer

Here's one more MWE showing a solution. Note especially a) that the problem is not related to Xe(La)TeX b) how I used the filecontents package/environment to add a .bib file and make the exampe compilable.

Your desired citation format boils down to turning off name list disambiguation (uniquelist=false). See section 4.11.4 of the biblatex manual for details. I didn't try to remove "et al." because one (IMO) should at least display that there are other authors, if not their names.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[style=authoryear-icomp,uniquelist=false,maxnames=2,minnames=2,maxbibnames=99,
    backend=biber]{biblatex}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@misc{A01x,
  author = {A and B and C and D and E},
  year = {2001},
  title = {A bibentry},
}
@misc{A01y,
  author = {A and B and C and D and E and F},
  year = {2001},
  title = {Another bibentry},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}

Some text \autocite{A01x}.

Some text \autocite{A01y}.

\printbibliography

\end{document}

enter image description here

Related Question