Problems with unsrt bibliography style

Question

I am writing my thesis in LaTex but I have some problems with the bibliography. As always, I use the unsrt bibliography style to get the citations in order of appearance. However, this time it doesn't work so as a first citation I have the number 2 instead of the number 1.

That's the code I use:

\bibliographystyle{unsrt}
\bibliography{bibliography}

The bibliography is in a .bib file. I also would like to add all the references I do not cite explicitly in the text. So I usually add \nocite command. It works but in the text I get [?] instead of citations.

This usually works in the past articles I wrote, I don't know why now it doesn't. Do you have any suggestions?

(I am using Overleaf)

Thanks!

Answer 1

Tell natbib you want things numbered and sorted in the package options using \usepackage[sort,numbers]{natbib}, then tell it that's also how you want the references to be formatted \bibliographystyle{unsrtnat} (ending in nat "suitable" for natbib). Then to toggle on/off the references use \nocite{*} and you will get something that looks like:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[sort,numbers]{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{unsrtnat}

\begin{document}
\citet{alice} said something to \citet{bob}.
\nocite{*} % Toggle for unused references. 
\bibliography{references}
\end{document}

gives

where for the references.bib we have:

@misc{alice,
    title = {Something},
    year = {2020},
    author = {Alice}
}

@misc{bob,
    title = {Something else},
    year = {2020},
    author = {Bob}
}

@misc{charles,
    title = {Something completely different},
    year = {2020},
    author = {Charles}
}