Biblatex formatting for N.N. Authors

Question

I am using biblatex with the citation style alphabetic and I have troubles with formatting a special author set-up:

If there is no author sometimes one writes N.N. (= non nominatur in Latin). I have this in my bibliography for several entries as authors (Author = {N.N.}), but formatting gives me not the necessary output.

A full example for a bibliography entry should look like:

[NN16] N.N.: Document title, 2016

But the result I get after compiling looks like:

[N.N16] N.N.: Document title, 2016

I think this is not surprising regarding the normal rules on how biblatex abbreviates authors names and surnames. But so far I failed with finding a good modification to achieve the desired format.

Does anyone have a good idea on how to solve this? Thanks for your input on this!

Here is a MWE, please note it does not contain further formatting of the citation as noted before, but is just using alphabetic:

\begin{filecontents*}{Beispielbibliographie.bib}
@Article{NN16,
  Title                    = {Document title},
  Author                   = {N.N.},
  Year                     = {2016},
}
\end{filecontents*}

\documentclass[12pt]{scrartcl}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[german]{babel}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage[backend=bibtex, bibstyle=alphabetic, citestyle=alphabetic,
firstinits=true, isbn=false, doi=false, maxnames=4, minnames=3,
maxalphanames=3, url=false, maxbibnames=99]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{Beispielbibliographie.bib}

\begin{document}

\cite{NN16}


\printbibliography[heading=bibnumbered,title=Literaturverzeichnis]

\end{document}

Answer 1

With Biber I get NN16 in your example.

I'm not quite sure it is the best idea to write author = {N.N.}, if you have no author (at least use author = {{N. N.}}, or author = {{N.\,N.}},).

You can use the label field as a drop-in replacement for the letters generated from the label names

@article{NN16,
  title  = {Document title},
  author = {{N.\,N.}},
  label  = {NN},
  year   = {2016},
}

---

Alternatively, just add shortauthor = {NN}, for the expected output. That is because shortauthor is given preference over author when constructing the labels.

@article{NN16,
  title       = {Document title},
  author      = {{N.\,N.}},
  shortauthor = {NN},
  year        = {2016},
}