Should listed citations in a historical overview be ordered numerically or chronologically?

Question

I'm writing an article and in one portion I give a brief historical overview of previous work on the problem I am studying. (In case this matters, it's a pure math article, specifically topology.) I include references to the articles where the prior work I describe first appeared. But I am trying to be brief, so in many instances I cite several articles in a list. For example: blah blah blah [A, B, C], except that my bibliography is numerical (as is conventional for where I'm submitting it).

Now, I could order my citations so that this [A, B, C] becomes [1, 2, 3], but I like the idea of preserving the chronology of the development in the citation. For example, let's say my bibliography is like this.

[1] Mike, 1980.

[2] Sally, 1968.

[3] Tamara, 1985.

And let's say I write "A sequence of articles developed the concept...," and I want put in the citation for the articles I'm referring to. I like the idea of indicating the order of the development, but am not sure if it looks too weird. So is it better to put

"A sequence of articles [2, 1, 3] developed the concept..."

or

"A sequence of articles [1, 2, 3] developed the concept...?"

Answer 1

It is perfectly normal in topology for lists of citations to appear with the corresponding numbers out of order, eg.

This idea has been widely studied [21, 5, 13].

You should give the citations in the order you want the reader to consider them (in this case chronological sounds most suitable), and beyond that leave the labelling to Bibtex.

Answer 2

If you adopt an official citation style, then this will dictate the rules for ordering in-text citations and end of document references.

In-text citation ordering rules

When multiple authors appear in one citation block, then there are various rules depending on the citation style: (a) alphabetically by first author surname, (b) arbitrary when using a numbered reference style, except are typically consecutive (e.g., 1-3, or 1,3,4), although based on @Jessica's answer ordering may not be required by all style guides.

End of document reference ordering rules

Two common rules are (a) alphabetically by surname and then by year for papers by the same author (e.g., APA style), (b) in order of appearance in the manuscript (i.e., when using superscript numbers).

General points about showing historical development of ideas

If you want to show the development of ideas include something in the text that indicates this development. For example ,

Jones (2000) was the first to propose the idea. Several researchers further developed the idea including Smith (2005), Brown (2007), and then Cooper (2009).

or euivalently:

Jones (1) was the first to propose the idea. Several researchers further developed the idea including Smith (2), Brown (3), and then Cooper (4).