[Tex/LaTex] Unexpected citation behavior: biblatex with biber and authoryear

biberbiblatexciting

The citation style authoryear-comp is designed to output citations of the form '(Doe, 1992)'. (See p. 62 of the biblatex documentation.) This has worked as expected for me, even when using Biber as backend.

Recently, however, the behavior of authoryear-comp with biblatex does not match this. Instead of outputting citations of the form (Doe, 1992), it is simply printing the title and the year of the corresponding entry.

Here's a minimal example: 

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[style=authoryear-comp,backend=biber]{biblatex}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{Bli74,
  author = {Blinder, Alan S.},
  year = {1974},
  title = {The economics of brushing teeth},
  journaltitle = {Journal of Political Economy},
  volume = {82},
  number = {4},
  pages = {887--891},  
}
\end{filecontents}

\bibliography{\jobname}

\begin{document}

This paper is very good: \cite{Bli74}.

\printbibliography

\end{document}

And the generated pdf:

Output using biber and authoryear-comp

Again, if I don't call Biber, biblatex behaves as expected given the citation style.

I'm using pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-1.40.12 (TeX Live 2011), and biblatex v1.7. I get the same results using XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-0.9997.5 (TeX Live 2011).

Thoughts?

Best Answer

Looks like you're compiling the document using the backend=biber option setting, but with a bbl file generated by bibtex. biber outputs a dedicated \name for labelname. It won't find this \name from bibtex output, so the fallback title field is printed instead. You need to run latex and biber when switching from the bibtex backend. Similarly you should run bibtex when switching from biber.

Here are the \name elements for your entry from biber:

\entry{Bli74}{article}{}
  \name{labelname}{1}{}{%
    {{uniquename=0,hash=8a4ba46206eec0a36340f92bf9ee4f86}{Blinder}{B\bibinitperiod}{Alan\bibnamedelima S.}{A\bibinitperiod\bibinitdelim S\bibinitperiod}{}{}{}{}}%
  }
  \name{author}{1}{}{%
    {{uniquename=0,hash=8a4ba46206eec0a36340f92bf9ee4f86}{Blinder}{B\bibinitperiod}{Alan\bibnamedelima S.}{A\bibinitperiod\bibinitdelim S\bibinitperiod}{}{}{}{}}%
  }
...

Compare this with the output from bibtex:

\entry{Bli74}{article}{}
  \name{author}{1}{}{%
    {{}%
     {Blinder}{B.}%
     {Alan~S.}{A.~S.}%
     {}{}%
     {}{}}%
  }
...
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