How to sort references by the lastname of the first author and citation style should be <Name, year>

Question

In a single-column journal paper, I would like to sort the reference by the lastname of the first authors and also the citation style should be

 (<LastName of first author, year>)

All the references are in the same .tex file where the paper's title and authors and abstract are also located.

 \bibliographystyle{alpha}
 \begin{thebibliography}{1}

 \bibitem{AnItemName}
  LastName, J., LastName, Y., 2002, \emph{How to write a book}, Journal of MATH, 57, 1093-1111.

 \end{thebibliography} 

I cannot figure out how to do this even though I have checked

• Sort by author in Alpha bibliography

• Order by first author only (not all names) than by year or Sort by a partial entry in biblatex

• Sorting references - last names' alphabetical order

Answer 1

If creating the bibliography entirely by hand is ok by you, you can get your desired citation call-out style rather easily. Simply:

• load the natbib package with the option round and use \citep{<key>} to generate the citation callouts; and

• use the optional argument of each \bibitem directive to store just the first author's surname and the publication year (in parentheses), with no space between the surname and the (year).

A full example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[round]{natbib} % for '\citep' macro
\begin{document}

\citep{AnItemName} % generate a 'parenthetic-style' citation call-out

\begin{thebibliography}{1}

% Note: No space between 'SurnameA' and '(year)'
\bibitem[SurnameA(2002)]{AnItemName}
SurnameA, J., SurnameB, Y., 2002, \emph{How to write a book}, Journal of MATH, 57, 1093--1111.

\end{thebibliography} 
\end{document}