custom sorting order in citation call-outs

Question

I use natbib with the following options:

\usepackage[round,compress]{natbib}

Using the \citep command, I get citation call-outs that look as follows:

(Author et al. 2013, Author & Other 2011, Author et al. 2012)

What I would like is for the list to be compressed and sorted in ascending year order, at least for the same author list (or abbreviation):

(Author & Other 2011, Author et al. 2012,2013)

If I use natbib's sort&compress instead of sort, then I get, at another place

(Author et al. 2015a, 2017, 2015b)

What I would like is, again, that the years be in ascending order:

(Author et al. 2015a,b, 2017)

I think the problem is that the sorting is done according to the order in the references, where all author names matter, including the hidden ones in the "et al." parts.

With author-year citations and abbreviated author lists, this does not make sense, IMO, and is against many journal rules.

Is there a way in which that can be fixed?

Answer 1

This is the standard behaviour of biblatex's authoryear-comp (or authoryear-icomp) style. The sort scheme with that style is nyt, i.e. name > year > title. Citation call-outs are also sorted.

biblatex tries very hard to avoid collapsing different lists of authors into the same abbreviated form. If this is wanted and forced with uniquelist=false, you get exactly what you expect.

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel} 
\usepackage{csquotes} 
\usepackage[backend=biber,style=authoryear-icomp,maxcitenames=1,uniquelist=false]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib} 
@misc{alpha,
  author = {Author, A. and Buthor, B. and Cuthor, C.},
  year = {2001},
  title = {Alpha},
}
@misc{beta,
  author = {Author, A. and Cuthor, C. and Buthor, B.},
  year = {2002},
  title = {Beta},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
\cite{sigfridsson,alpha,worman,beta}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

gives

Author et al. 2001, 2002; Sigfridsson et al. 1998; Worman 2002

in citations.

With uniquename=true (the default), you get

Author, Buthor et al. 2001; Author, Cuthor et al. 2002; Sigfridsson et al. 1998; Worman 2002

For help on how to switch to biblatex see What to do to switch to biblatex?, biblatex in a nutshell (for beginners), bibtex vs. biber and biblatex vs. natbib. Since it is recommended to use the new Biber backend instead of BibTeX with biblatex, have a look at Biblatex with Biber: Configuring my editor to avoid undefined citations.