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I have a thesis which has two bibliographies. It includes a list of publications and a reference list.

The reference list should be unsorted, or rather, sorted in order of appearance, while the list of publications should be sorted by date.

I have used biblatex to do this. To sort the references by order of appearance I have used the sorting=none option in the preamble, and I have generated the list of publications by using


but have noticed that this in fact sorts the publications by name.

I have seen this: biblatex style with multiple bibliographies in one document, which seemed to indicate that sorting separate bibliographies with different sorting options was a coming feature. I just updated biblatex now, and it doesn't seem to be here yet.

Is there some way of forcing the list of publications to be sorted by date? I tried setting the presort, sortkey and sortname fields manually, but that did not seem to work. Any hack solution while waiting for the new biblatex version would be appreciated.

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One way to do it might be to actually cite the publications in the order I want, but then those citations would appear in the text. Is there some way I can tuck away these dummy citations? This would be a pretty dirty hack. I hope there is a better way. –  Katt Jan 24 '12 at 23:20
Biber has this functionality but the interface in biblatex is not implemented yet. It's planned for biblatex 2.x –  PLK Jan 25 '12 at 7:44
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2 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

Use \nocite to "cite" the publications in the order you want.




  author = {Author, A.},
  year = {2001},
  title = {Alpha},
  author = {Buthor, B.},
  year = {2002},
  title = {Bravo},
  keywords = {pub},
  author = {Cuthor, C.},
  year = {2003},
  title = {Charlie},
  keywords = {pub},
  author = {Zuthor, Z.},
  year = {2000},
  title = {Zulu},



Some text \autocite{B02,A01}.


\printbibliography[title={Reference list},notkeyword=pub]

\printbibliography[title={List of publications},keyword=pub]


enter image description here

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At the moment you can't have different sorting schemes for different bibliographies, this still has to be implemented.

There is a way around this limitation which I use, but it probably won't do the trick for you: I often have a bibliography and a filmography. While the bibliography is sorted nyt, the filmography should be sorted by titles. In this case you can use the \DeclareSortExclusion command to get different sorting schemes:


Here I can simply define that the various names shouldn't be used for certain document types. Of course, this will only help you if the reference list uses different document types than the bibliography.

EDIT: The possibility to have different sorting schemes is now available in the dev builds and will be part of 'biblatex 2./biber 1.0'. If you're not afraid of Github and building your own Perl programs, you can have this functionality already.

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Many thanks for the "you can't have different sorting schemes for different bibliographies", @Simifilm - I just now need something like that, and I couldn't really confirm if this was an existing option in biblatex or not... Thanks also for the workaround tip - cheers! –  sdaau May 24 '12 at 7:26
See my EDIT: This is now available in the dev tree. –  Simifilm May 24 '12 at 11:41
Thanks for that note, @Simifilm - cheers! –  sdaau May 24 '12 at 16:11
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