Why do I get (author?) when I use citet with natbib?

Question

I would like to show the author names using citet but I get just the reference number. Here is a minimal code:

documentclass{report}
usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
usepackage[english]{babel}
usepackage{natbib}

begin{document}

The author citet{toschi09} has shown that ..

bibliographystyle{plain}
bibliography{foo}

end{document}

And here is foo.bib

@article{toschi09,
author = {Toschi, F. and Bodenschatz, E.},
title = {Lagrangian Properties of Particles in Turbulence},
journal = {Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics},
volume = {41},
number = {1},
pages = {375-404},
year = {2009}, 
}

What I get is:

The author (author?) [1] has shown that ..

Any help will be more than welcome, thank you!

Torbjørn T. · Accepted Answer

The plain bibliography style is for numerical references only, while citet only makes sense for author-year citations. Use natbibs own version of plain, called plainnat, instead, and this works fine. I.e. change to

bibliographystyle{plainnat}

This is in fact documented on page 7 of natbibs manual:

The authors can only be listed if the .bst file supports author–year
  citations. The standard .bst files, such as plain.bst are numerical
  only and transfer no author–year information to LaTeX. In this case,
  citet prints “(author?) [21].”

user42062 · Answer

I was getting this problem with a custom-generated bibliography style (using Patrick Daly's custom-bib generator, merlin.mbs). The solution (pointed out to me very helpfully by Patrick) is to generate a style using author-year citations, but use the "numbers" option in the LaTeX document, i.e. in the .dbj file produced by merlin.mbs, uncomment the line

ay,%: Author-year

and in the .tex file specify

usepackage[numbers]{natbib}

ay,%: Author-year

and in the .tex file specify

usepackage[numbers]{natbib}

maple · Answer

For those who are also confused by these kinds of problem: Please check there should be not space in the cite command. You should write cite{aa,bb,cc} instead of cite{aa, bb, cc}.

Paul Rougieux · Answer

For Lyx users, remember that in Lyx bibliography settings are configured in two places:

Document / Settings / Bibliography

Click on Document / Settings / Bibliography to open this configuration dialog:

Here you can set the citation style format to natbib author year.

The BibTex bibliography dialog

The first time, click on Insert / List TOC / Bib(la)Tex Bibliography to insert this dialog at the end of your document. For future edit simply click on the BibTex bibliography dialog at the end of your document.

This is where you should change the style to plainnat [author year] or apalike (author year). This citation key style will then be used by the citep{} and citet{} in your text as well as in the bibliography section.

koppor · Answer

In case of the IEEEtran document class, one has to replace
bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}

by
bibliographystyle{IEEEtranN}

Why do I get (author?) when I use citet with natbib?

5 Answers

Document / Settings / Bibliography

The BibTex bibliography dialog

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