Bibtex style help - alphabetical sort

Question

I have found a Bibtex style that suits my requirements very well as it presents my sources exactly how I want.

I am using the \nocite{*} command to display all my bibliography sources from my .bib file. My issue is that the sources then appear in the order that they are in the Bib file rather than in alphabetical order by author surname.

Is there any way someone can tell me how to edit the bst file to make the references appear in alphabetical order rather than in the listed order?

I have been searching around for ages trying to sort this myself but to no avail.

Answer 1

Sorting of references is a job for the bibliography style file .bst. The bibliography style you are using cj.bst is set-up to not sort the references, or rather to print them in the order they are cited. \nocite{*} then gives the order they are listed in the bib file.

Reading the file cj.bst you can see that it has been generated by the makebst utility of custom-bib, plus a final bit of hand editing. Fortunately, the bst file tells us that custom-bib was provided with the options

 %% merlin.mbs  (with options: `seq-no,nm-rev,ed-rev,jnrlst,nmlm,x10,x0,m1,dt-beg,
 yr-par,xmth,yrp-x,vol-bf,vnum-x,volp-com,numser,edpar,blk-tit,in-x,pp,ed,abr,xedn,jabr')

The first option seq-no means that references are to be listed in the order they are cited. To effect sorting, we should reproduce this creation process without this first option, as sorting by author name is the default. This may accomplished by creating the file cjj.dbj:

\input docstrip

\preamble
----------------------------------------
*** cj with sort ***

\endpreamble

\postamble
End of customized bst file
\endpostamble

\keepsilent

\askforoverwritefalse
\def\MBopts{\from{merlin.mbs}{%
nm-rev,ed-rev,jnrlst,nmlm,x10,x0,m1,dt-beg,yr-par,xmth,yrp-x,vol-bf,vnum-x,volp-com,numser,edpar,blk-tit,in-x,pp,ed,abr,xedn,jabr  }}
\generate{\file{cjj.bst}{\MBopts}}
\endbatchfile

and running latex on this file to produce cjj.bst. Using this style as follows

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\bibliographystyle{cjj}
\bibliography{bib}
\end{document}

with bib.bib containing

@Article{test,
  author =   {Author, First},
  title =    {Title},
  journal =  {Jour},
  year =     2000
}

@Article{type,
  author =   {Aardvark, New},
  title =    {Titling},
  journal =  {J},
  year =     2002
}

produces

with the references sorted by author.

This may be good enough for your purposes. As mentioned above, the file cj.bst contains a couple of edits by hand to change some fine details of the printing of certain references. These are clearly flagged in that file, and it should not be too hard to implement those changes should you be so inclined.

Answer 2

Will using \bibliographystyle{alpha} or \bibliographystyle{plain} help?:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\nocite*{}
\bibliographystyle{alpha}  %% or 
%\bibliographystyle{plain}    %% ???
\bibliography{myrefs}
\end{document}