In \bibliographystyle{alpha}, can I sort references by the first author's last name instead of by the marker?

Question

I'm creating a bibliography using \bibliographystyle{alpha}. Consider the following three references.

[Gab72] Peter Gabriel...

[GJ09] Paul G. Goerss and John F. Jardine...

[GR92] Peter Gabriel and Andrei V. Roiter...

They are automatically being displayed in my LaTeX file in the ordering above. This is alphabetical order by the marker: [Gab72] < [GJ09] < [GR92]. Is it possible to instead have the ordering based on alphabetical ordering of the first author's last name? This would instead give the following ordering:

[Gab72] Peter Gabriel...

[GR92] Peter Gabriel and Andrei V. Roiter...

[GJ09] Paul G. Goerss and John F. Jardine...

I would prefer this latter ordering because then Peter Gabriel's references are adjacent.

If you're willing to use biblatex, \usepackage[sorting=nty,style=alphabetic]{biblatex} should do the trick... — Jonathan, Aug 09 '13 at 22:49
@Jonathan: I've tried using biblatex, but now whenever an entry has four or more authors, it suppresses all initials; e.g., I'd like to see [DEFG88] instead of [Dir+88] for a paper written by Dirac, Einstein, Fermat, and Galois; also, it doesn't work with {\relax } to treat multiple letters as one (e.g. for Hungarian authors). Can the problem above be solved within bibtex? — Marco Golla, Jul 03 '19 at 13:48
@MarcoGolla Check out the maxnames option of biblatex. Also, there is the option to use unicode and even giving each entry a field to be used for sorting only. Unfortunately the biblatex documentation can be quite overwhelming, but searching for maxnames and sorting might help. — Jonathan, Jul 03 '19 at 15:07
The answer in https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/472951/35864 discusses sorting alphabetic styles and has a solution for a babalpha-based style. — moewe, Jul 07 '19 at 14:59

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 04 '19 at 14:35

3

I guess you have only the problem with this one. The simple solution is

@Misc{GR92, 
title = {Title Text}, 
author= {Peter Gabriel and Andrei V. Roiter...}, 
year= {2019}, 
sortkey = {Gac}, 
}

I'm not sure what you use so try sort, sortkey, or presort.

edited Jul 04 '19 at 14:35

epR8GaYuh

2,432

answered Jul 04 '19 at 14:27

protter

300

1

Thanks, but I would like a more systematic solution, rather than an ad hoc one. – Marco Golla Jul 05 '19 at 09:12
can you post more code? Are you using natbib biber or biblatex. A functional minimal example of code would be nice – protter Jul 05 '19 at 13:06

In \bibliographystyle{alpha}, can I sort references by the first author's last name instead of by the marker?

1 Answers1