Sorting Dutch surnames with 'van' and 'van der' in bibliography

I suggest you proceed as follows:

  • Locate the file apalike.bst in your TeX distribution. Make a copy of this file and call the copy, say, apalike-nl.bst. (You're obviously free to select another file name.)

  • Open the file apalike-nl.bst in a text editor; the program you use to edit your tex files will do fine.

  • Locate the function sort.format.names in the bst file. (In my copy of this file, this function starts on line 914.)

  • In this function, locate the following line:

          s nameptr "{vv{ } }{ll{ }}{  f{ }}{  jj{ }}" format.name$ 't := % <= here
    

    Change this line to

          s nameptr "{ll{ }}{vv{ }}{  f{ }}{  jj{ }}" format.name$ 't :=
    

    I trust you can guess what the ll and vv components of a full name denote.

  • Save the file apalike-nl.bst either in the directory where your main tex file is located or in a directory that's searched by BibTeX. If you choose the latter option, be sure to update the filename database of your TeX distribution appropriately.

  • In the main tex file, change the instruction

    \bibliographystyle{apalike}
    

    to

    \bibliographystyle{apalike-nl}
    

    and rerun LaTeX, BibTeX, and LaTeX twice more to fully propagate the change.

Happy BibTeXing!


Here's a minimal working example (MWE). Observe that "van Bronckhorst" is listed before "de Bruyne"; with the standard version of apalike, "de Bruyne" would come before "van Bronckhorst".

enter image description here

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{mybib.bib}
@misc{kdb, author="Kevin de Bruyne", title="Thoughts", year=2018}
@misc{gvb, author="Giovanni van Bronckhorst", title="Thoughts", year=2018}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[round,authoryear]{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{apalike-nl}

\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document}

No need to change the bibliography style; recycling https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/40750/4427 should work:

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@article{vannoort,
  author={{\VAN{Noort}{Van}{van}} Noort, Thomas},
  title={An important paper},
  journal={Journal},
  year=2010,
}
@article{kdb,
  author={{\VAN{Bruyne}{De}{de}} Bruyne, Kevin},
  title={Thoughts},
  journal={Journal},
  year=2018,
}
@article{gvb,
  author={{\VAN{Bronckhorst}{Van}{van}} Bronckhorst, Giovanni},
  title={Thoughts},
  journal={Journal},
  year=2018,
}
\end{filecontents*}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[authoryear]{natbib}
\usepackage{hyperref}

% #1: sorting key, #2: prefix for citation, #3: prefix for bibliography
\DeclareRobustCommand{\VAN}[3]{#2} % set up for citation

\begin{document}

\citet{vannoort}
\citet{kdb}
\citet{gvb}

% here we change the meaning of \VAN to use the prefix for the bibliography
\DeclareRobustCommand{\VAN}[3]{#3}

\bibliographystyle{apalike}
\bibliography{\jobname}

\end{document}

enter image description here

If you don't need to uppercase “Van” or “De”, you can just set

\DeclareRobustCommand{\VAN}[3]{#3}

in the preamble and comment out the second setting. One could also go with just two arguments, but being redundant can save later troubles.

With the change one gets

enter image description here