But if you want to sort (incorrectly, as per APA) in order of appearance, adding
<key variable="citation-number"/> before title in the sort section should work.

In the bibliography, not the citation sort section

Hm, I cannot get it to work. I changed it to:
<bibliography hanging-indent="true" et-al-min="21" et-al-use-first="19" et-al-use-last="true" entry-spacing="0" line-spacing="2">
<sort>
<key variable="citation-number"/>
<key macro="author-sort"/>
<key macro="date-sort-group" sort="ascending"/>
<key macro="date-sort" sort="ascending"/>
<key macro="title"/>
</sort>
which works in the text, as in the first cited reference with the same author list in the text is "a", the second "b", etc. But the order of the references section is messed up. There, I still want the alphabetical order.
Any ideas how to make this work? I am surprised that this is not the standard. In economics at least, journals usually start with "a" in text and have alphabetically sorted reference sections. Fully aware that this is APA but other Zotero styles like Chicago and Harvard don't do this either...

I think "alphabetical" refers to alphabetical by author, which obviously all author date styles do, but the last code snippet wouldn't (it'd sort like a numerical bibliography). I think we all agree that once you create a,b,c by order of appearance, they should appear in the same order in the bibliography .

<bibliography hanging-indent="true" et-al-min="21" et-al-use-first="19" et-al-use-last="true" entry-spacing="0" line-spacing="2">
<sort>
<key macro="author-sort"/>
<key macro="date-sort-group" sort="ascending"/>
<key macro="date-sort" sort="ascending"/>
<key variable="citation-number"/>
<key macro="title"/>
</sort>

Should work for that, though. Can you replicate this not using a,b,c in order of appearance in a fresh document?

Oh, but those are alphabetical by 2nd or 3rd author respectively. If you don't want that, you'd have to play with author mins in the sort keys

Hm, no. It starts with "d" in the text and the bibliography is wild:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u5581225/v27argjgvvabdt4ikzfh.png

I cannot find the AER style - just "Latin American Economic Review", but that one also does not work and starts with "c"...

Can this be done for Oxford Press HUMSOC as well? [recap: First in-text citation of one of three Brodeur et al (2024) papers should show (2024a) and the reference section should be sorted alphabetically by author.]

I tried to copy paste the bib sort section from bwiernik's github (see above) but it does not work.

<bibliography hanging-indent="true" et-al-min="21" et-al-use-first="19" et-al-use-last="true" entry-spacing="0" line-spacing="1">
<sort>
<key macro="author-sort" names-min="3" names-use-first="1" names-use-last="false"/>
<key macro="date-sort-group" sort="ascending"/>
<key macro="date-sort" sort="ascending"/>
<key variable="status"/>
<key variable="citation-number"/>
<key macro="title"/>
</sort>

In-text citations start with Brodeur et al. (2024a), which is correct but the reference section is not in alphabetical order:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u5581225/oqy02e3wffwccup38fk6.png

When I change <key variable="status"/> to <key variable="author"/> the reference section is in alphabetical order but then the in-text citations start with Brodeur et al. (2024c) instead of (2024a).

What can I do to fix that?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Hm, above code for apa from bwiernik does what I want. It just does not work for Oxford Press HUMSOC when i copy paste the bibliography sort code or play around with it trying different things.

The edited apa style does what I want:
1) In-text: the first occurence of an in-text citation of one of the three Brodeur et al. (2024) papers is marked as "a", the second as "b", and the third as "c"
2) the reference section is sorted alphabetically for all references (marked with the red arrow in the screenshot below), and
3) the three Brodeur 2024 papers show up in the order a,b,c in the reference section (marked in yellow)

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u5581225/75ptdradltvzntfzbbze.png

Now, when I use the Oxford Press HUMSOC one, I can get either the in-text citations to show up as in 1) or the reference section to be in alphabetical order but not both like for apa. If the in-text citations start with 2024a, then the reference section looks like this:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u5581225/98e8y3iucm25eq6wb6xg.png

Yes. This is the code I am using:

<citation et-al-min="3" et-al-use-first="1" disambiguate-add-year-suffix="true" givenname-disambiguation-rule="primary-name" collapse="year">
<sort>
<key macro="author"/>
<key macro="issued-year"/>
</sort>
<layout prefix="(" suffix=")" delimiter="; ">
<group delimiter=" ">
<text macro="author-short"/>
<text macro="issued-year"/>
<text macro="citation-locator"/>
</group>
</layout>
</citation>
<bibliography hanging-indent="true" et-al-min="21" et-al-use-first="19" et-al-use-last="true" entry-spacing="0" line-spacing="1">
<sort>
<key macro="author-sort" names-min="3" names-use-first="1" names-use-last="false"/>
<key macro="date-sort-group" sort="ascending"/>
<key macro="date-sort" sort="ascending"/>
<key variable="status"/>
<key variable="citation-number"/>
<key macro="title"/>
</sort>