UK TeX FAQ -- question label citesort

### Sorting and compressing citations

If you give LaTeX `\``cite{fred,joe,harry,min}`, its default commands could give something like “[2,6,4,3]”; this looks awful. One can of course get the things in order by rearranging the keys in the `\``cite` command, but who wants to do that sort of thing for no more improvement than “[2,3,4,6]”?

The cite package sorts the numbers and detects consecutive sequences, so creating “[2–4,6]”. The natbib package, with the `numbers` and `sort&compress` options, will do the same when working with its own numeric bibliography styles (plainnat.bst and unsrtnat.bst).

If you might need to make hyperreferences to your citations, cite isn’t adequate. If you add the hypernat package:

      \usepackage[...]{hyperref}
      \usepackage[numbers,sort&compress]{natbib}
      \usepackage{hypernat}
      ...
      \bibliographystyle{plainnat}

the natbib and hyperref packages will interwork.

`cite.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/cite (or browse the directory)
`hypernat.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/misc/hypernat.sty
`hyperref.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/hyperref (or browse the directory)
`plainnat.bst`
  Distributed with macros/latex/contrib/natbib (or browse the directory)
`unsrtnat.bst`
  Distributed with macros/latex/contrib/natbib (or browse the directory)

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