Trouble with in-text citation sorting with biblatex

Question

I have quite a bit of trouble getting my in-text citations sorted alphabetically using biblatex. I am using the 'apa' style with biber. Since APA7 recommends sorting in-text citations primarily alphabetically I am surprised that this wasn't the default for me. In-text citations just show up in the order I put them in the code. I have already read through some related questions and found the sortcites and sorting=nyt options, which I put into my code. While I can influence the sorting of my bibliography with this just fine, it has no impact whatsoever on the in-text citations. This is regardless of which citation command I use (e.g. \autocites, \parencites).

This is the MWE, with which the problem still exists:

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage[backend=biber, style=apa, sortcites, sorting=nyt]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{debugLib.bib}
\begin{document}    
\textcites{sellars}{belardi}
\printbibliography  
\end{document}

My library layout looks as follows:

@book{belardi,
  title = {Supervision: Grundlagen, Techniken, Perspektiven},
  shorttitle = {Supervision},
  author = {Belardi, Nando},
  date = {2005},
  series = {C.H. Beck Wissen},
  edition = {2., aktualisierte Aufl},
  publisher = {C.H. Beck},
  location = {München},
}
@article{sellars,
  title = {Learning from Contemporary Practice: An Exploration of Clinical Supervision in Physiotherapy},
  shorttitle = {Learning from Contemporary Practice},
  author = {Sellars, Julie},
  date = {2004},
  journaltitle = {Learn Health Soc Care},
  volume = {3},
  number = {2},
  pages = {64--82}
}

What I get with this is the following:

All my software should be up to date - I triple checked. I know I could just manually change the order of the tags, but for the future I would like this to be done automatically. So I would be grateful if someone can see what I don't and can come up with a solution to put in-text citations in an alphabetical order.

Answer 1

The main problem here is that biblatex cannot sort across different arguments of a multicite command. So

\textcites{sellars}{belardi}

cannot be sorted, but

\textcite{sellars,belardi}

will be. This is not an issue if you don't need to give page references to your citations, because then the normal cite command with a comma-separated list of entries works just fine. If you have to give page references for each citation, you have to use the multicite version, in which case you have to sort manually. (Or try and use a workaround like Sorting citations using \cites command in biblatex. See also https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues/214.)

A secondary point here is that with style=apa, you should drop the sortcites, sorting=nyt, options. The style already enables citation sorting (actually, it enables a slightly more complicated scheme to conform to APA requirements: https://github.com/plk/biblatex-apa/issues/152), so you don't need sortcites, because it is already set. You definitely shouldn't set sorting=nyt, since that will select generic name-year-title sorting, instead of the slightly more complex APA-compliant scheme that style=apa, sets automatically. Generally, I recommend to use as few options as possible: only use them when you know that you need them.

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage[backend=biber, style=apa]{biblatex}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@book{belardi,
  title      = {Supervision},
  subtitle   = {Grundlagen, Techniken, Perspektiven},
  author     = {Belardi, Nando},
  date       = {2005},
  series     = {C.H. Beck Wissen},
  edition    = {2., aktualisierte Aufl.},
  publisher  = {C.H. Beck},
  location   = {München},
}
@article{sellars,
  title        = {Learning from Contemporary Practice},
  subtitle     = {An Exploration of Clinical Supervision in Physiotherapy},
  author       = {Sellars, Julie},
  date         = {2004},
  journaltitle = {Learn Health Soc Care},
  volume       = {3},
  number       = {2},
  pages        = {64--82}
}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\begin{document}    
\textcite{sellars,belardi}
\textcite{belardi,sellars}
\printbibliography

\end{document}