biblatex sorting when the same first name is spelled out or an initial

Question

I am trying to sort some citations/bibliography by the following keys:

1. Author name (as formatted by maxnames and uniquenames).
2. Publication year (as formatted by labelyear).

Using some standard options, I can get the formatting almost perfectly:

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{papers.bib}
  @article{colby_1999,
  author={Colby, J and Brown, A and Brown, B},
  title={Title},
  year={1999},
  }

  @article{colby_2000,
  author={Colby, John and Brown, A and Brown, B},
  title={Title},
  year={2000},
  }

  @article{colby_2001,
  author={Colby, J and Brown, A and Brown, B},
  title={Title},
  year={2001},
  }

  @article{colby_2001_2,
  author={Colby, J and Damon, A and Brown, B},
  title={Title},
  year={2001},
  }

  @article{colby_2002,
  author={Colby, J and Class, A and Brown, B},
  title={Title},
  year={2002},
  }

  @article{colby_a_2002,
  author={Colby, A and Class, A and Brown, B},
  title={Title},
  year={2002},
  }

  @article{adams_1998,
  author={Adams, J and Class, A and Brown, B},
  title={Title},
  year={1998},
  }

  @article{adams_2002,
  author={Adams, J and Class, A and Brown, B},
  title={Title},
  year={2002},
  }
\end{filecontents*}

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[style=authoryear-comp, natbib, backend=biber]{biblatex}
\ExecuteBibliographyOptions{
  maxnames    = 1, 
  maxbibnames = 99, 
  uniquelist  = false, 
  uniquename  = true, 
  dashed      = false, 
  firstinits  = true}
\addbibresource{papers.bib}

\begin{document}
\citep{colby_1999,colby_2000,colby_2001,colby_2001_2,colby_2002,adams_2002,adams_1998,colby_a_2002}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

The only catch is that I would like the "Colby, John" and all of the "Colby, J" entries to be treated the same for sorting purposes. In other words, I want all of those entries to be compacted into 1 block in the citation, and I want the "Colby, John" entry to be sorted by year within the other "Colby, J"s in the bibliography. Something like this:

Answer 1

The thing to remember is that Biber can't know that "John Colby" and "J Colby" are the same person purely by syntax (which is all it has to go on ...). The "firstinits" option does not effect sorting as it's common for people to want to sorting to obey full names in the case of identical initials etc.

You have several options:

1. Edit your bibliography source data and make the names which are semantically equivalent, syntactically equivalent so that Biber has the relevant information for sorting.
2. Edit your bibliography source data to add sortname and/or shortauthor fields to change the sorting to what you need, without changing the names.
3. Use the Biber sourcemap option as mentioned in the comments to automatically do either 1. or 2. without changing the source at all.
4. Use the biber 0.9.9 (beta) "sortfirstinits" option which makes the sorting algorithm use only the initials of the first names. An unofficial biblatex 1.7 patched .sty, .def and .pdf doc is here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/biblatex-test and you will need biber 0.9.9 beta from sourceforge. The new option is in the test biblatex manual. Try it with sortfirstinits = true in your options.

Where possible, I recommend option 1. as it's better to make syntax and semantics coincide when you need to automated systems.

To only consider the first author for sorting, you could do something like this with sourcemap:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<config>
  <sourcemap>
    <maps datatype="bibtex" map_overwrite="1">
      <map>
        <map_step map_field_source="AUTHOR" map_match="\AColby," map_final="1"/>
        <map_step map_field_set="SORTNAME" map_origfieldval="1"/>
        <map_step map_field_source="SORTNAME" map_match="\A(.+?)\s+and" map_replace="$1"/>
      </map>
    </maps>
  </sourcemap>
</config>