"spurious" parentheses in authoryear styles

[matteofg]

In authoryear styles, if the year/date field is not entered, "spurious" parentheses remain.

% !TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode
% !TEX program = lualatex
% !BIB program = biber

\begin{filecontents}[overwrite]{\jobname.bib}
@article{a,
  author = {Williams, Robert},
  title = {Title of the article},
  journaltitle = {Journaltitle},
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[style=authoryear]{biblatex}
  \addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
\autocite{a}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

[plk]

Well, year/date is a required field for articles ... (p. 9 of the manual) and running biber with --validate-datamodel will tell you this.

[moewew]

See also the second part of the discussion in https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues/793.

[matteofg]

I read the discussion #793. In my opinion, if PL had wanted to emphasize the mandatory nature of the year/date field, the output of authoryear could have simply been as follows:

Doe, Jane and John Due (). “Example title”. In: Topnotch Studies 4.1, pp. 1-13.

and not

Doe, Jane and John Due (n.d.). “Example title”. In: Topnotch Studies 4.1 (), pp. 1–13.

The presence of (n.d) implies that the exception of an undated bibliographic entry was expected.

However, I have seen that in the biblatex-ext bundle, in the authortitle styles, the {issue+date} macro has been redefined by adding the appropriate conditional. So, for consistency, in biblatex-ext it would be desirable to do that for the authoryear styles as well (imho).

[moewew]

It may be more instructive to look at the output in a non-authoryear style, because those don't have to have the citation label after the author name. (For one, early versions of biblatex didn't have nodate at all. It was added in later.)

---

What biblatex-ext does is not immediately relevant for core biblatex. Bugs for biblatex-ext should be reported at https://github.com/moewew/biblatex-ext/issues.

[matteofg]

Whatbiblatex-ext does is not immediately relevant for core biblatex. Bugs for biblatex-ext should be reported at https://github.com/moewew/biblatex-ext/issues.

Of course -- it was my intention to do that as soon as this discussion was over.