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".

\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}

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