I dealt with this issue at length in a separate thread (“Different author rendering in entry citation vs. list”) a couple months after you asked about this, so for the benefit of anyone who has been following this thread specifically, I’ll describe the solution I found here.

There are (at least) a few commands defined in publ-imp-ini.mkiv that can help conditionally render author fields according to cite parameters rather than list parameters. The first, \btxflushauthornormal{author} (where author can be replaced by another name-type field, if I understand correctly), will flush the specified field according to the “normal” authorconversion. There are similar commands for \btxflushauthorname, \btxflushauthornormalshort, \btxflushauthorinverted, and \btxflushauthorinvertedshort, if you need a different conversion.

If you also want to use other cite-specific name-rendering parameters, like etallimit, etaldisplay, and etaloption, then the \currentbtxciteauthorbyfield (which does not accept an argument and will only render the author field or any field in the author set) will do this.

To handle citation alternative-dependent formatting, you can use the \currentbtxcitealternative as follows:

```
\doifelse {\currentbtxcitealternative} {entry} {

    % Normal short conversion for entry citations

    \btxflushauthornormalshort{author}

} {

    % Normal conversion for list citations

    \btxflushauthornormal{author}

}
```

Joey