How to custom arrange in-text citations

Hi Everyone

I am looking for help with my in-text citations. I have 3 papers from the same authors published in the shame year (productive of them!). Currently they are arranged alphabetical based on the title, but I want them to be arranged based on order of appearance in the text.

It is arranged in the bibliography as follows:

Haim A, Fourie FL (1980a) Heat production in cold and long scotophase acclimated and winter acclimatized rodents. Int J Biometeorol 24:231-236

Haim A, Fourie FL (1980b) Heat production in nocturnal (Praomys natalensis) and diurnal (Rhabdomys pumilio) South African murids. S Afr J Zool 15:91-94

Haim A, Fourie FL (1980c) Long scotophase increases heat production in Rhabdomys pumilio and Praomys natalensis (Rodentia). S Afr J Sci 73:89

However, I cite Haim A, Fourie FL (1980b) first, and would like it to become Haim A, Fourie FL (1980a). Any advice?

Funnily enough, that is how most publishing houses want them cited.  They want them in the bibliography in a certain order and don’t appear to care that the citations themselves look “out of order” in the text.  

If you want to overcome this anyway, you will need to use a custom field and assign them a number or letter and then edit the output style to incorporate the field as the 1st criteria for sorting, but not place the field in the citation or bibliography. (I haven’t tested this, it may need to be the second criteria).  

Or you could try editing the year in a  copy of your library to include the letter to see if that will force sort it according to the year. You may still have to edit the output style to make the year, an early sort criteria.  

Hi All

So I managed to figure it out, with a bit of help from a friend and the internet.

  1. Choose “Edit…Preferences”
  2. Select “Reference Types” then choose the “Modify Reference Types” button.
  3. Scroll down in the table of reference types, until you see the Generic
    name of the Custom field on the left column (i.e., “Custom 1,” “Custom 2”).
  4. Type in the name of the Custom field across that entire row to ensure you
    are adding it to all reference types. (Note that you can call the Custom
    field anything you want (i.e., “Special Notes”) but remember that when
    searching or sorting, EndNote will use the generic name “Custom 1” or
    “Custom 2,” etc. for that field).
  5. Click OK to save you Reference Types.
  6. Click OK again to save your Preferences.

Now open any reference, and you will see your custom field with the name you
have assigned it. Then you can assign those specific refs 1,2,3 and choose the custom in the sort category.

Great!  I am  a bit surprised adding it to the generic ref type also forces the field to show in the individual ref types that you are going to use, but if it works - good.  If it doesn’t you may want to modify each of the ref types (Journal, Book, Book chapter) and make sure that custom field isn’t used for something else too.  It is in the output style that you apply the sorting criteria and I think you can do it in either the bibliography settings (so they come up in the a,b,c order there too) or in the citation settings (if you want them to be abc in the text but don’t care about in the bibliography.