How to order citations by appearance using BibTeX

Question

By default  using the plain style  BibTeX orders citations alphabetically    How to order the citations by order of appearance in the document

User · Answer

I use natbib in combination with bibliographystyle apa   Eg      begin document   The body of the document goes here      newpage   bibliography bibliography    Or whatever you decided to call your  bib file    usepackage round  comma  sort amp compress   natbib    bibliographystyle apa   end document

User · Answer

If you happen to be using amsrefs they will override all the above - so comment out    usepackage amsrefs

User · Answer

The best I came up with is using the unsrt style  which seems to be a tweaked plain style  i e    bibliographystyle unsrt   bibliography bibliography    However what if my style is not the default

User · Answer

I often use the bibliography style natbib because it supplies quite complete set of formats as well as tags for us

User · Answer

Add this if you want the number of citations to appear in order in the document they will only be unsorted in the reference page    bibliographystyle unsrt

User · Answer

There are three good answers to this question    Use the unsrt bibliography style  if you re happy with its formatting otherwise Use the makebst  link  tool to design your own bibliography style   And my personal recommendation    Use the biblatex package  link   It s the most complete and flexible bibliography tool in the LaTeX world    Using biblatex  you d write something like   documentclass 12pt  article   usepackage sorting none  biblatex   bibliography journals phd-references    Where journals bib and phd-references bib are BibTeX databases  begin document   cite robertson2007   cite earnshaw1842   printbibliography  end document

User · Answer

I m a bit new to Bibtex  and to Latex in general  and I d like to revive this old post since I found it came up in many of my Google search inquiries about the ordering of a bibliography in Latex   I m providing a more verbose answer to this question in the hope that it might help some novices out there facing the same difficulties as me   Here is an example of the main  tex file in which the bibliography is called    documentclass article   begin document   So basically this is where the body of your document goes     FreeBSD is easy to install    said no one ever  cite drugtrafficker88      Yeah well at least I ve got chicken    said Leeroy Jenkins  cite goodenough04     newpage  bibliographystyle ieeetr    Use ieeetr to list refs in the order they re cited  bibliography references    Or whatever your  bib file is called  end document       and an example of the  bib file itself    ARTICLE  goodenough04  AUTHOR       G  D  Goodenough and others    TITLE        What it s like to have a sick-nasty last name   JOURNAL      IEEE Trans  Geosci  Rem  Sens    YEAR         xxxx   volume       xx   number       xx   pages        xx--xx     BOOK  drugtrafficker88  AUTHOR       G  Drugtrafficker    TITLE        What it s Like to Have a Misleading Last Name   YEAR         xxxx   PUBLISHER    Harcourt Brace Jovanovich  Inc   ADDRESS      The Florida Alps  FL  USA      Note the references in the  bib file are listed in reverse order but the references are listed in the order they are cited in the paper   More information on the formatting of your  bib file can be found here  http   en wikibooks org wiki LaTeX Bibliography Management

User · Answer

Just a brief note - I m using a modified version of plain bst sitting in the directory with my Latex files  it turns out having sorting by order of appearance is a relatively easy change  just find the piece of code        ITERATE  presort   SORT           and comment it - I turned it to             avoid sort     ITERATE  presort        SORT           and then  after running bibtex  pdflatex  pdflatex - the citations will be sorted by order of appearance  that is  they will be unsorted         Cheers   EDIT  just realized that what I wrote is actually in the comment by  ChrisN   can you edit it to remove the SORT command

User · Answer

The datatool package offers a nice way to sort bibliography by an arbitrary criterion  by converting it first into some database format   Short example  taken from here and posted for the record    documentclass article    usepackage databib    begin document    First argument is the name of new datatool database   Second argument is list of  bib files  DTLloadbbl mybibdata  acmtr    Sort database in order of year starting from most recent  DTLsort Year descending  mybibdata    Add citations  nocite       Display bibliography  DTLbibliography mybibdata   end document

User · Answer

Change    bibliographystyle plain    to   bibliographystyle ieeetr    Then rebuild it a few times to replace the  aux and  bbl files that were made when you used the plain style   Or simply delete the  aux and  bbl files and rebuild   If you use MiKTeX you shouldn t need to download anything extra

User · Answer

with unsrt the problem is the format  use  bibliographystyle ieeetr  to get refences in order of citation in document

User · Answer

You answered your own question---unsrt is to be used when you want references to ne listed in the order of appeareance   But you might also want to have a look at natbib  an extremely flexible citation package  I can not imagine living without it

[latex] How to order citations by appearance using BibTeX?

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