Change Citation Sort Order with Number of Authors

Hi,

Is it possible to change the sort order of citations in the bibliography based on the number of authors. If I have two authors, I need the citations to be ordered alphabetically, but if there are 3 or more authors, I need the citations ordered chronologically. For Example:

Smith E, (1980) Title…

Smith E, Hunter I (2004) Title…

Smith E, Johnson P (1999) Title…

Smith E, Hunter I, Johnson P, Peters C (1979) Title…

Smith E, Clark T, Peters C (1980) Title…

Thank you.

I seriously question a publisher that tries to make these kind of rules that are difficult to achieve or even understand.  Why? May I ask who is requiring it, and I will avoid publishing there!

There are many options of how to order citations defined in the output style (see attached image for where those settings are) and they don’t need to be the same as the sorting in the bibliography, where similar settings can be defined. You can get close with # of Authors +  Author then Year, but it won’t sort the more than 3 as you describe, as it will continue to sort them by number of authors then alphbetically and finally year.    

You could use and sort on a custom field and put some numbers in it to override these setting, but you will need to order them manually, but in my humble opinion, if editors want to define such nonsensical  demands, they should editorial manage the citations before they publish.  They probably have some in house “script” to do it, I guess.  

Thank you for your reply. I was thinking I would have to do it manually!

For the record, though this post is old, I also have this issue. It is not editors beng whimsical, there are good reasons for it. If you go to 2 authors (Jones & Smith 2007) but use et al for 3 (Jones et al 2009), then it makes sense to sort by author 2 for 2 author papers, because both authors are given in the citation, but my date for 1 or 3+ authors because no second author is given. I agree that the exisiting options get us close, only the custodians of the styles can say if it is close enough.