IEEE Journal abbreviations with biblatex

Question

I have a bibliography file obeying BibTeX rules, which I know can be compiled always with biblatex. This Question already clarifies how to use biblatex to produce references in IEEE style.

Now the problem is that I want abbreviated journal titles generated with biblatex while the source is a normal .bib file with no abbreviations used in journal field (this field, in fact has two possibilities, see below).

If it were BibTeX, I could have used the usual IEEEabrv.bib that is available from CTAN to decode the abbreviations, for e.g.:

IEEE_J_IT = {IEEE Trans. Inf. Th.}

May I know how to get the same abbreviated journal titles with biblatex??

By the grace of JabRef, I also have the luxury of having two kinds of source .bib files:

1. A .bib source with journal field carrying short codes such as IEEE_J_IT -or-
2. A .bib source with journal field carrying full titles mentioned such as IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

All that I need is to generate the output, something like "IEEE Trans. Inf. Th.", using biblatex+biber.

Answer 1

The Biber/biblatex combination should still be able to load the 'abbreviations' database:

% Provide some test content
\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@article{Bao2015,
  author  = {Bao, Z. and Pan, G. and Zhou, W.},
  doi     = {10.1109/TIT.2015.2421894},
  issue   = {6},
  journal = IEEE_J_IT,
  pages   = {3413-3426},
  title   = {Asymptotic Mutual Information Statistics of
    {MIMO} Channels and {CLT} of Sample Covariance Matrices},
  volume  = {61},
  year    = {2015},
}
\end{filecontents*}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[style = ieee]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{IEEEabrv.bib}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\printbibliography

\end{document}

Compiling with an up-to-date Biber/biblatex, this comes out as expected.