[Tex/LaTex] Using acronyms for institutions in citations messes up sorting in the bibliography when using “author-year”

acronymsbiblatexcross-referencingsorting

I would like to abbreviate "European Commission" by "EC", also when citing a document of the EC. The problem is that the abbreviation will only be introduced when I write "\ac{EC}" (using the acronym package) in the text but not when I cite a document of the EC.

I have tried to work around this problem by writing "\ac{EC}" in the author field of my bibliography file. This works fine, except that the sorting in the references section gets messed up when using "author-year", because "\ac{EC}" is recognized as starting with an "a".

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[printonlyused]{acronym}
\usepackage[backend=bibtex,
    natbib=true,
    style=authoryear, 
    firstinits=true,
    uniquename=init,
    isbn=false,
    doi=true,
    url=true,
    clearlang=true,
    dashed=false
]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{../library.bib}
\acrodef{EC}{European Commission}

\begin{document}
\citet{Baltensperger2015} \\
\citet{EuropeanCommission2013a}\\
\citet{EuropeanCommission2013}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

The reference section then starts with the "EC" citations instead of the "Baltensperger" one.

References EC (2013a). Quarterly report on European Gas Markets, first
quarter 2013. Tech. rep. retrieved from
https://ec.europa.eu/energy/en/statistics/ market-analysis. EC
(2013b). Quarterly report on European Gas Markets, second quarter
2013. Tech. rep. retrieved from https://ec.europa.eu/energy/en/statistics/ market-analysis.
Baltensperger, T. et al. (2015). Some title…

Any ideas how I could use abbreviations in this way and get the sorting right?

Best Answer

You can use the sortname field to specify the name used for sorting, so you would probably go for

sortname={EC}

or

sortname={European Commission}

If you use Biber the sorting is correct automatically, because the \ac is ignored when the sort order is determined.

For BibTeX there is the old \noopsort trick (see the UK TeX FAQ)

@PREAMBLE{ {\providecommand{\noopsort}[1]{}} }

and 

author = {{\noopsort{EC}}{\ac{EC}}}
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