unsorted abbreviated bibliography style

[Phillip Helbig (undress to reply)]

Standard LaTeX has the plain, unsorted, abbreviated, and alphabetical
bibliography styles. Often, a more specialized style is required, often
an author-year type, by journals, book publishers, universities etc.
Natbib and custom-bib take care of this. However, when writing for a
general audience who might not recognize many or most of the references,
I agree that numbered references are preferable to authors' names and
years of publication in the text.

Is there a consensus on whether an alphabetically sorted or an unsorted
reference list is better? I am partial to the unsorted one, but in this
case there is no abbreviated option.

Is there a .bst which is like a combination of unsrt and abbrv?

[John Harper]

Just look at the ref lists in the papers you read. Their editors presumably
had reasons for their choice of styles. There is clearly no consensus
especially if like mine your work is interdisciplinary. I prefer author-year
sorted alphabetically myself with the ref list giving papers' titles. Some
journals agree, but some number the references in the order one's paper
mentions them, and give no titles or last pages of papers (my least
preferred system, but I must use it too when writing for such journals.)