Citations within footnotes in LaTeX

This blog post was published 11 years ago and may or may not have aged well. While reading please keep in mind that it may no longer be accurate or even relevant.

Writing a tutorial on programming, I needed citations within footnotes. Luckily, the biblatex package added support (see first comment on the sourceforge page of biblatex) for citations within footnotes in 2011. Apparently, this is not straightforward, since a low-level citation command has to be used to satisfy LaTeX. Anyway, this is now done automatically by the biblatex package, so I didn’t have to make any changes.

In my document, I only use the LaTeX command \autocite which behavior I can define in the document preamble. In my preamble I have:

\\usepackage\[backend=biber,autocite=footnote,style=authortitle-ibid\]{biblatex}
\\bibliography{bibliography.en.bib}

Now, with the following TeX code…

\\chapter{My chapter}

This is a test\\footnote{TeX is awesome \\autocite[see][p. 120]{Knuth}. I agree.} for
a citation within a footnote. However, this is a citation\\autocite\[\]{Ritchie75} in
normal text.

… we get the following output:

You will notice that footnote 2 is a citation from within the normal text. Since I’ve coded autocite=footnote in the preamble, this is rendered as a footnote. However, the citation from within the footnote 1 is rendered in-line.

If you found a mistake in this blog post, or would like to suggest an improvement to this blog post, please me an e-mail to michael@franzl.name; as subject please use the prefix "Comment to blog post" and append the post title.

Keywords: latextexlive