[texhax] Bibliography is driving me nuts...

[Robin Fairbairns]

> Last couple of hours, I've been trying to get numerical mode
> citation(using natbib), with the same order for the bib entries in my
> bib file, which I gave in .bib file.Numbers of course appear, but some
> thing like 5 comes before 3, 22 comes before 3... Why the heck, it
> rearranges the order alphabetically?

bibtex does the sorting, based on the style you specify in the
\bibliographystyle command. 

for numeric keys, pretty well the only sensible choices[*] you have are
alphabetic sort according to sort key (usually the author names:
plainnat.bst) or sorted according to the order of citation
(unsrtnat.bst).

you want something else, you have to do the ordering yourself, after
bibtex has done the formatting.  get a complete dissertation, get the
point where you could print it, apart from the sorting of the bib.  edit
the file <mythesis>.bbl to change the ordering of the \bibitem entries.
now rerun latex twice.  perform a quick visual check.  print final copy.

[*] of course someone else will know think of another alternative ...
just because i produced this two-element list.