How to order citations in References by appearance, but still have author-year labels appearing in the text (besides numbers)

Question

Hi Based on previous post How to order citations by appearance using BibTeX? ,

I tried randomly things like \bibliographystyle{unsrt}, ..., but I don't numbers in the body of the paper

I also tried using

\usepackage[round, comma, sort&compress ]{natbib}

\bibliographystyle{amsalpha}
\bibliography{...}

However, the first line seemed to do nothing except produce the message Natbib error : Bibliography not compatible with author-year citations

which slowed down things without influencing the outcome.What to do?

Answer 1

Since you're using the natbib citation management, I suggest that you (a) load the package with the option authoryear and (b) employ the unsrtnat bibliography style.

That said, I'd like to repeat the concern voiced in @leandriis' comment: Assuming your paper cites more than half a dozen pieces, how on earth are your readers supposed to find the bibliographic entries that correspond to the citation call-outs? If you wish to employ authoryear-style citation call-outs, I really can't see a valid reason for not sorting the entries alphabetically by authors' surnames.

\documentclass{article}
\begin{filecontents}[overwrite]{mybib.bib}
@misc{a,author="A",title="Aa",year=3001}
@misc{z,author="Z",title="Zz",year=3002}
\end{filecontents}

\usepackage[round,authoryear]{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{unsrtnat}

\begin{document}
\cite{z}, \cite{a}
\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document}