Reporting text in citations rather than numbers

Since you're using the plain bibliography style (and, apparently, no citation management package such as cite), and since you appear to be ok with the way the bibliographic entries are formatted and with using BibTeX, I would like to suggest that you

• load the natbib citation management package with the options authoryear and round -- viz., run usepackage[authoryear,round]{natbib};

• change the instruction bibliographystyle{plain} to bibliographystyle{plainnat}; and

• keep using cite (or citet) to create text-style citation call-outs and start using citep to create parenthesis-style citation call-outs.

E.g., to generate "(e.g., Dubois et al, 2015; Acemoglu and Linn, 2004)", assuming the entries have keys dubois-etal:2015 and acemoglu-linn:2004, respectively, you'd write

citep[e.g.,][]{dubois-etal:2015,acemoglu-linn:2004}

For the very first compilation run after changing the argument of bibliographystyle, it may be necessary to delete the .aux and .bbl files.

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Here's an MWE (minimum working example) that shows how this setup should work.

documentclass{article}
begin{filecontents}[overwrite]{mybib.bib}
@misc{abc:2000,
  author = "Anna Author and Brenda Brandywine and Carla Carlsson",
  title  = "Thoughts",
  year   = 2000,
}
end{filecontents}

bibliographystyle{plainnat}
usepackage[authoryear,round]{natbib}

begin{document}
citep[e.g.,][]{abc:2000}
bibliography{mybib}
end{document}