It seems that you can’t reorganize the sidebar list by dragging and dropping, but can things be alphabetized? You’ll see in the screenshot that the upper left up arrow and down arrow icons are dimmed. Please tell me I’m missing something obvious.
Ah, I tried it, @greenery, and learned some things:
If you look very carefuly at the icons, this is what they express, also 
Why are they there? I’m thinking it’s to give the ability to manipulate the folders when you are in Edit, so that when there are many items (as you seem to have) you can choose different areas to work in without leaving that mode.
Interesting thoughtfulness, isn’t it, as much else thought out to give as much ability as the Apple interface allows, once you discover such points
For moving items up and down, probably you know the triple-bar tabs on the right side do that, using your finger…
By a certain @KB 
Thank you for confirming the not-so-great news.
Well, odd reply, but also your odd locution in the posting led to not seeing what you were after, read late at night.
‘It seems that you can’t reorganize the sidebar list by dragging and dropping’ … of course, that’s exactly what you are able to do.
What you’re not able to do, and misunderstood the buttons as if they should do this, is to automatically reorder your documents.
This is not possible in the main Scrivener program either, and I looked on your behalf to see if Aeon Timeline might be able to do it, perhaps from its Outline, but not offered there as well.
Taking it a little further for a moment’s look, I think you could get your references in alphabetic order by something like the following:
Surely you’d get a better possibility if you wrote a feature request. Or kept your voluminous references in some other fashion, perhaps a higher end outliner which can do the ordering you like - OmniOutline might.
It’s interesting that this feature you want seems missing from any iPad writing apps of note – Word included. Pages can do it apparently in Tables, if that would suit your items.
In closing, it’s really quite something to find the sourness from persons who think software should just ‘do what they personally want’. I didn’t write here only to help you, but it was in a generosity, besides being curious.
You went to a lot of trouble testing the possibilities from every software angle. I appreciate your help, and apologize for offending you. However I feel about software, I didn’t mean to be sour toward you.
IOS Scrivener doesn’t have an Outliner view. On the desktop platforms, though, you can sort the outline by any column, including title. Then, to make the sort permanent, select the rows you’re interested in and drag and drop them into their original folder in the Binder.
@kewms Katherine, what @greenery wants is to Alphabetize the References – 400 of them. So they were looking for an automatic method, which I think doesn’t exist, thus the discussion of work-arounds
I would just wait until the next time you’re around a Mac or PC and can use the full program. This can be done in a matter of seconds then, with the Edit ▸ Sort ▸ Ascending (A to Z) menu command. That works on both paragraphs in the editor, and items in a selected group in the binder.
Bingo, @AmberV – that works!
And will for @greenery’s folder of 400 items…
I’d also thought further on what @kewms proposed, and there’s a way that might work out reasonably for some uses, if it’s only as a view and not organizing the actual documents, to do that sort in the Outliner.
Very nice to learn what you guys who have lived with Scrivener know
p.s. and even a ‘researching’ , internet searching latest LLM couldn’t realize about that command. Probably hadn’t read AmberV’s book
Well, what was being described there is how you can make a visual sort permanent. The edit menu sort feature only works on the title field. If you want to, say, sort by a custom metadata date field that represents chronological events, then you can add that field to the Outliner as a column, click on the header to sort by it, and then drag and drop into the binder to implement the sort permanently. That said, if you try it in the Windows version it won’t work. It ignores selection order in all contexts, when in fact selection order should always be important (for example, dragging from a Collection back into the binder).
Ha - well, I think you’re talking Scrivener Graduate Institute level, on that one
…and only on Macintosh, so I haven’t privilege to get there (if years of Macs in past!)
See what I mean, about the guy who wrote the book
I’ve experimented with some of the possible solutions mentioned here, but Amber’s suggestion worked well: I transferred the whole project to my MacbookPro and it’s magic, really, what you can do. I have been trying to work more on the iPad but it’s not practical in my case. I use Scrivener exclusively for saving and organizing research – because write historical fiction and I’m neck deep in the stuff. So thanks everyone. There is a solution, but not working on an iPad.
Mobile is nice for jotting down ideas, for obvious reasons, as one nearly always has at least their phone on them, and there is something to be said for the focus a greatly limited device gives you. But yeah, for that same reason, overall I don’t find it a compelling environment for sitting down and doing much more than typing. There are too many compromises to be made for how the user interface must be finger-friendly, for example. Scrivener can offload hundreds of useful utilities, just like this, because menu entries have no substantial overhead. If all of this had to be buttons it would look like the worst of 1998.
I missed that the References weren’t individual documents.
@kewms even so, @AmberV showed how your idea actually could work, with that unsuspected agile mouse move…unless it’s not able on simply titles…
I actually find a good feeling in how echoing this around in community got to the best answer, and where it will work, and am especially glad it has, for patient @greenery 
Yes, I found a way to make it work as long as I stay on the MacBook Pro. On the iPad Scrivener is very limited. Thanks again for your help.
