Wrong alphabetical order in .bbl file

Question

I have a problem with alphabetical order of my bibliography, which is not due to my .bib file, but rather in the way in which the .bbl file is generated. Let me explain the problem by means of a fictitious example.

Imagine that in my .bib file I have the following two entries:

@article{ABC14,
    author = {Abel, A. and Barnett, B. and Conway, C.},
    journal = {Journal 1},
    title = {Title 1},
    year = {2014}
}
@article{AD10,
    author = {Abel, A. and Donald, D.},
    journal = {Journal 2},
    title = {Title 2},
    year = {2010}
}

After running bibtex, I obtain a .bbl file where the two corresponding entries are

\bibitem[Abel and Donald(2010)]{AD10}
A. Abel and D. Donald.
\newblock {Title 2}.
\newblock \emph{Journal 2}, 2010.

\bibitem[Abel et~al.(2014)Abel, Barnett, and Conway]{ABC14}
A. Abel, B. Barnett and C. Conway.
\newblock {Title 1}.
\newblock \emph{Journal 1}, 2014.

As a consequence, these two articles appear in the wrong alphabetical order in the bibliography at the end of my article. I suspect that the issue lies somewhere in the .bst file and, in particular, in the function FUNCTION {format.names} which introduces the "et al." in place of the full list of authors. Anyhow, how can I fix this issue?

Answer 1

As @UlrikeFischer has already pointed out in a comment, and as @Robert has confirmed in a separate answer, the alphabetical sorting mechanism employed by the plainnat and abbrvnat bibliography styles appears to thrown off if the citation keys of entries with the same first author are followed by either "et al" (for three or more authors) or just a single (second) author.

Until this issue is fixed by the author/maintainer of the natbib package, you'll have to employ the \noopsort device that's illustrated in the following example.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{mybib.bib}
@preamble{ "\providecommand\noopsort[1]{}" }
@article{ABC14,
    author  = {Adrienne \noopsort{1}Abel and Bertha Barnett and Christine Conway},
    journal = {Journal 1},
    title   = {Title 1},
    year    = {2014},
}
@article{AD10,
    author  = {Adrienne \noopsort{2}Abel and Deirdre Donald},
    journal = {Journal 2},
    title   = {Title 2},
    year    = {2010},
}
\end{filecontents}

\bibliographystyle{abbrvnat}
\usepackage[round]{natbib}

\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document}

Answer 2

This problem is caused by the bibliography style files of the natbib package. I can reproduce the issue with both plainnat and abbrvnat. In each case, BibTeX sorts the bibliography entries by the shortened author lists rather than by the full author lists as they appear in the bibliography. So in your case, "Abel and Donald(2010)" comes before "Abel et~al.(2014)". Moreover, all three-author papers with Abel as first author will in effect be sorted chronologically by year, rather than alphabetically by author names.

I do not think anyone has published a fix for that bug yet.

An admittedly inelegant, but effective, work-around would be to edit the .bbl file by hand, fixing any issues related to the incorrect sorting, before the final LaTeX production run of the document. If you go this route, be sure not to re-run BibTeX after editing the .bbl file, as doing so would over-write the corrections you've applied by hand to the .bbl file.