[Tex/LaTex] Sorting references with given bibliographystyle

natbibsorting

I am writing a scientific article and plan to submit it to a Springer journal. Unfortunately, Springer's LaTeX support is not very satisfying. You are forced to use Springer's LaTeX class svjour3 as well as one of their bibliography styles (both can be downloaded here).

Currently I am struggeling with the sorting in the bibliography as I want to sort by appearance, hence the first citation in the article should be cited with [1]. This works well with the bibliographystyle unsrtnat, but doesn't work with spmpsci, which I must use for the journal. Here is a MWE:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[numbers,sort&compress]{natbib}

\begin{document}
This citation~\cite{Smith2009} should be named \emph{1}, while this one here~\cite{Fisher2013} should be numbered \emph{2}. How can we resort by appearance?

\bibliographystyle{spmpsci}
\bibliography{references}

\end{document}

With the bibliography file references.bib:

@article{Fisher2013,
author = {Michael Fisher},
journal = {Fisher journal},
pages = {1--10},
title = {The one title},
volume = {12},
number = {12},
year = {2013}
}

@article{Smith2009,
author = {John Smith},
journal = {Smith journal},
pages = {11--20},
title = {The other title},
volume = {13},
number = {1},
year = {2009}
}

Thanks in advance.

Best Answer

I was asking Springer's support and they answered that I shall ignore the problem and they will manage to sort the references correctly upon acceptance.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Sorting of references in Bibliography (books/articles) with correct labels

Using biblatex 2.0 and biber 1.0. You have to redefine the nyt sorting scheme and add a custom field, example below. In general, this is easy, just add a custom field with an ordering value based on the entrytype of the entry, then sort on this after the year:

\DeclareSourcemap{
  \maps[datatype=bibtex]{
    \map{
      \pertype{book}
      \step[fieldset=usera, fieldvalue=1]
    }
    \map{
      \pertype{article}
      \step[fieldset=usera, fieldvalue=2]
    }
  }
}

\DeclareSortingScheme{nyt}{
  \sort{
    \field{presort}
  }
  \sort[final]{
    \field{sortkey}
  }
  \sort{
    \name{sortname}
    \name{author}
    \name{editor}
    \name{translator}
    \field{sorttitle}
    \field{title}
  }
  \sort{
    \field{usera}
  }
  \sort{
    \field{sorttitle}
    \field{title}
  }
  \sort{
    \field{sortyear}
    \field{year}
  }
  \sort{
    \field[padside=left,padwidth=4,padchar=0]{volume}
    \literal{0000}
  }
}

[Tex/LaTex] Problem with Springer bibliography style(spbasic + natbib)

You need to create and use a modified version of the spbasic bibliography style.

Find the file spbasic.bst on your computer. Create a copy of this file and call the copy, say, spbasic_unsort.bst.
Open the file spbasic_unsort.bst in a text editor.
Find the two lines that start with SORT (note: uppercase is important), and comment out -- or simply delete -- both of these lines.
Save the file spbasic_unsort.bst either in the directory that contains your main tex file or in a directory that's searched by your tex distribution. If you choose the latter method, be sure to also update the filename database of your TeX distribution.
In your main tex file, change the instruction \bibliographystyle{spbasic} to \bibliographystyle{spbasic_unsort}. Then, rerun LaTeX, BibTeX, and LaTeX twice more to fully propagate all changes.

This technique also works for the \bibliographystyle{spmpsci}, where the same problem is observed. There is only one instance of a line (line number 1462) starting with SORT in the file spmpsci.bst. Either we can comment or delete that line.

Happy BibTeXing!

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