Problem with Springer bibliography style(spbasic + natbib)

Question

I am writing a paper to a Springer journal and I am trying to use their \bibliographystyle{spbasic}. I want to sort citation by appearance, hence the first citation in the article should be cited with [1] and second with [2] and so on. But citation is sort by the reference's alphabetically order.

\documentclass[smallextended]{svjour3}
\begin{document}
\usepackage[sort&compress,numbers]{natbib}
.............. \cite{S1} .......... \cite{S2}
\bibliographystyle{spbasic} 
\bibliography{sssat.bib}   % name your BibTeX data base

\end{document}

Answer 1

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!