diff --git a/beir/retrieval/evaluation.py b/beir/retrieval/evaluation.py
index 0cb2f14..435cbe0 100644
--- a/beir/retrieval/evaluation.py
+++ b/beir/retrieval/evaluation.py
@@ -1,5 +1,6 @@
 import pytrec_eval
 import logging
+from copy import deepcopy
 from typing import List, Dict, Tuple
 from .search.base import BaseSearch
 from .custom_metrics import mrr, recall_cap, hole, top_k_accuracy
@@ -37,6 +38,27 @@ def rerank(self,
                     
         return self.retriever.search(new_corpus, queries, top_k, self.score_function)
 
+    @staticmethod
+    def _get_keys_lexically_sorted(qrel: Dict[str, Dict[str, int]], results: Dict[str, Dict[str, float]]) \
+            -> Tuple[Dict[str, Dict[str, int]], Dict[str, Dict[str, float]]]:
+        """
+        The evaluation happened in C, and the order of the dict items is lost there, and the new order is the
+        lexical order of the keys. In order to combat that (the order is important to us for evaluation metrics like
+        recall_1 vs recall_3), we add a prefix to the keys when they go into evaluation, so their lexical order will
+        match their order in the dictionary.
+        """
+        new_qrel = deepcopy(qrel)
+        new_results = deepcopy(results)
+        for query_id in new_results.keys():
+            result = new_results[query_id]
+            for i, (k_, v_) in enumerate(reversed(result.items())):
+                new_key = f"{i}-{k_}"
+                result[new_key] = result.pop(k_)
+                if k_ in new_qrel.get(query_id, []):
+                    new_qrel[query_id][new_key] = new_qrel[query_id].pop(k_)
+
+        return new_qrel, new_results
+
     @staticmethod
     def evaluate(qrels: Dict[str, Dict[str, int]], 
                  results: Dict[str, Dict[str, float]], 
@@ -67,9 +89,12 @@ def evaluate(qrels: Dict[str, Dict[str, int]],
         ndcg_string = "ndcg_cut." + ",".join([str(k) for k in k_values])
         recall_string = "recall." + ",".join([str(k) for k in k_values])
         precision_string = "P." + ",".join([str(k) for k in k_values])
-        evaluator = pytrec_eval.RelevanceEvaluator(qrels, {map_string, ndcg_string, recall_string, precision_string})
-        scores = evaluator.evaluate(results)
-        
+
+        sorted_qrel, sorted_results = EvaluateRetrieval._get_keys_lexically_sorted(qrels, results)
+        evaluator = pytrec_eval.RelevanceEvaluator(sorted_qrel,
+                                                   {map_string, ndcg_string, recall_string, precision_string})
+        scores = evaluator.evaluate(sorted_results)
+
         for query_id in scores.keys():
             for k in k_values:
                 ndcg[f"NDCG@{k}"] += scores[query_id]["ndcg_cut_" + str(k)]