Initials in the bibliography. firstinits/uniquename not working correctly in biblatex?

Question

Consider two MWEs (minimum working examples):

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{Delbaen1998,
year={1998},
title={Title3},
author={Delbaen, F.},
}
@article{Delbaen1994,
year={1994},
title={Title2},
author={Delbaen, Freddy},
}
@article{Delbaen1993,
year={1993},
title={Title1},
author={Delbaen, Freddy},
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[latin9]{inputenc}
\usepackage[style=authoryear
,uniquename=init
,firstinits=true
,backend=biber]{biblatex}
\bibliography{\jobname}

\begin{document}

\cite{Delbaen1993,Delbaen1994,Delbaen1998}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

and

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{Delbaen1998,
year={1998},
title={Title3},
author={Delbaen, Freddy},  % <----- THIS IS THE ONLY DIFFERENCE !
}
@article{Delbaen1994,
year={1994},
title={Title2},
author={Delbaen, Freddy},
}
@article{Delbaen1993,
year={1993},
title={Title1},
author={Delbaen, Freddy},
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[latin9]{inputenc}
\usepackage[style=authoryear
,uniquename=init
,firstinits=true
,backend=biber]{biblatex}
\bibliography{\jobname}

\begin{document}

\cite{Delbaen1993,Delbaen1994,Delbaen1998}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

The effect of the option uniquename=init is that a name with the same initials uniquely identifies a citation. The optionfirstinits=true makes the bibliography display only initials.

Somehow I think, that these two names (Freddy Delbaen and F. Delbaen) should also be considered to be "the same" in the bibliogrpahy. This would mean, that sorting and dashes in the first MWE should be as in the second example.

How can I achieve this, without manually editing my bibtex database?

(Do you think this should be expected behavior?)

Answer 1

Authors frequently publish under multiple variants of their name (e.g., PhD dissertations are often published under the author's full legal name), and in these cases I want a single author's publications to be sorted together in the bibliography and grouped together in my in-text citations. I also agree that it's best to make the author field represent the published form of the name.

Here's my solution in cases like these:

1. Use the sortname field in the .bib entry to establish the form of the name that you want to be used when sorting entries in the bibliography. Your first entry would be:

   @article{Delbaen1998,
   year={1998},
   title={Title3},
   author={Delbaen, F.},
   sortname={Delbaen, Freddy},
   }
   

2. Add the following code to your preamble. This determines the order of fields that biblatex looks to when creating the labelname field. By putting sortname at the top, whatever you put in your sortname field will override the author field for the purposes of your in-text citations and bibliography dashes. (You can rearrange the order of the other fields to suit your needs; sortname just needs to be at the top.)

   \DeclareLabelname{%
       \field{sortname}
       \field{shortauthor}
       \field{author}
       \field{shorteditor}
       \field{editor}
       \field{translator}
   }
   

This solution allows you to impose authority control without removing information from the author field, and it also allows you to use the full range of uniquename options if you do want to take advantage of biblatex's disambiguation capabilities.

I should note that I generally use a style where authors' names are spelled out in full in the bibliography. The method I described works for those styles as well as initials-only styles as in the MWE. In a spelled-out style, the author field will be displayed in full in the bibliography, but the sortname governs sorting and what appears in in-text citations.

EDIT: Per @Christian Hupfer's suggestion, here's a full example based on @user4514's MWE.

    \RequirePackage{filecontents}
    \begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
    @article{Delbaen1998,
    year={1998},
    title={Title3},
    author={Delbaen, F.},
    sortname={Delbaen, Freddy}, % This author is really Freddy Delbaen, not some other F. Delbaen.
    }
    @article{Delbaen1994,
    year={1994},
    title={Title2},
    author={Delbaen, Freddy},
    }
    @article{Delbaen1993,
    year={1993},
    title={Title1},
    author={Delbaen, Freddy},
    }
    \end{filecontents}

    \documentclass{article}
    \usepackage[latin9]{inputenc}
    \usepackage[style=authoryear
    ,uniquename=init
    ,firstinits=true
    ,backend=biber]{biblatex}

    \DeclareLabelname{%
        \field{sortname} % sortname takes precedence over author for grouping/dashing
        \field{shortauthor}
        \field{author}
        \field{shorteditor}
        \field{editor}
        \field{translator}
    }

    \bibliography{\jobname}

    \begin{document}

    \cite{Delbaen1993,Delbaen1994,Delbaen1998}

    \printbibliography
    \end{document}

Output:

With the following biblatex options for a spelled-out style:

    \usepackage[style=authoryear-comp % compact citations (authors' names are not repeated if identical)
    ,dashed=false % no dash in bibliography
    ,uniquename=init % we can still disambiguate names in citations
    ,firstinits=false % full names are used in bibliography
    ,backend=biber]{biblatex}

You get this output:

EDIT: The above answer works for biblatex version 2.9a. If you use version 3.0 or later, you need to use the following code in the preamble for step 2 instead of what was given above. This creates a field namea with the same content as sortname, and then namea is used for in-text citations rather than sortname.

\DeclareSourcemap{
  \maps[datatype=bibtex]{
    \map{
       \step[fieldsource=sortname]
       \step[fieldset=namea, origfieldval, final]
    }
  }
}
\DeclareLabelname{%
    \field{namea}
    \field{shortauthor}
    \field{author}
    \field{shorteditor}
    \field{editor}
    \field{translator}
}

See \DeclareLabelname not working in biblatex 3.0 for more information.

Answer 2

I think there are good reasons for this behaviour. Imagine you were citing works by Frank Delbaen, Freddy Delbaen, and Frannie Delbaen. It is good that they get sorted separately, and it could not be clear to biber who yet a fourth "F. Delbaen" actually is (one of those three, or someone else?). With long enough bibliography and using only first initials, some level of ambiguity may be unavoidable, either on the output side or on the (computer-generated) input side...

If you don't want to 'fix' your bibliography database, you could use \DeclareSourceMap to do the replacement for you. Something like:

\DeclareSourcemap{
  \maps[datatype=bibtex]{
    \map[overwrite=true]{
      \step[fieldsource=author,
        match=\regexp{Delbaen,\s+F\.},
      replace=\regexp{Delbaen,\x20Freddy}]
    }
  }
}

should do the trick. It searches for 'Delbaen,<+1 or more spaces>F.' and replaces it with 'Delbaen, Freddy' (with exactly one space).